Newly Uncovered Mountainville Fault Tied to 2024 New Jersey Earthquake
A study in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth identifies the Mountainville Fault near Tewksbury, NJ as a previously unmapped, immature basement fault that likely contributed to the April 2024 Mw4.8 quake near the Ramapo Fault. Using LiDAR topography, aftershock data, and lab friction tests, researchers tie the surface trace to a fault about 3.5 km west of the epicenter and warn that such hidden faults could pose important seismic hazards on the US East Coast, potentially triggered by local stress changes rather than Ramapo Fault slip alone.