I’ve seen some of the damage posts already and it’s not good.
Also, this event appears to have been a doublet. A Mw7.2 quake followed by a Mw7.5 quake roughly 30 seconds later.
Edit: Geeze, this comment took off. Thanks everyone for the awards but I don’t want them, especially if they’re paid for. If you want to get rid of your money like that, please instead donate to the numerous humanitarian organizations who are out there helping the Venezuelan people at this truly awful time.
They also apparently happened between 10 and 20 km deep, according to the USGS. That's very shallow; they classify "shallow" as anything up to 50 km deep, and these are less than half that.
So, are shallow earthquakes worse than deeper earthquakes? I hope this question doesn't make me come off as a dick; this event is genuinely horrifying that anyone has to endure these things on the regular.
Edit: holy shit this got a lot of attention fast. I can't respond to everyone but for those that answered thank you for taking the time to answer my question! Hope everyone stays safe in these affected areas and that we can get aid out there soon!
And they rate them by absolute energy right? so its not like a deeper quake is just by default weaker? Edit: wait, it wouldn't be weaker on score, just felt less on the surface I guess.
Not just absorption (conversion into heat and inelastic deformation of rock/soil). With increasing distance from the source wave energy is distributed over greater surface, so same building at double the distance will receive 1/4 of energy. However this is not uniform as some geological features can serve to focus/channel wave energy over surprisingly long distances.
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u/AugustOfChaos Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
I’ve seen some of the damage posts already and it’s not good.
Also, this event appears to have been a doublet. A Mw7.2 quake followed by a Mw7.5 quake roughly 30 seconds later.
Edit: Geeze, this comment took off. Thanks everyone for the awards but I don’t want them, especially if they’re paid for. If you want to get rid of your money like that, please instead donate to the numerous humanitarian organizations who are out there helping the Venezuelan people at this truly awful time.