All articles tagged with #mountainville fault
A magnitude-4.8 earthquake that surprised millions along the U.S. East Coast was traced to a previously unmapped fault in the New Jersey Highlands, now named the Mountainville Fault. The finding shows that hidden, immature faults can generate significant quakes away from major surface fault systems, underscoring the need to reassess regional seismic hazard near densely populated areas like New York City.
Columbia University researchers used LiDAR, aftershock locations, 3D seismic data, and lab tests to identify a previously unmapped, immature basement fault—the Mountainville Fault—about 3.5 km west of the Tewksbury epicenter. This fault better fits the 2024 Mw4.8 New Jersey quake than the Ramapo Fault and suggests a local shallow stress perturbation plus fault heterogeneity contributed to the event, indicating that immature faults could be significant earthquake sources in intraplate regions and deserve further study.
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.