Playing boomerang can be quite interesting to someone. How about a ‘boomerang’ earthquake? Scientists had discovered a rare ‘boomerang’ earthquake in the ocean bed of our planet.
A normal earthquake will travel in a direction, but not for the ‘boomerang’ earthquake. The earthquake gets its name from the boomerang effect where it is observed going away and then coming back to the starting point at a high speed.
A ‘boomerang’ earthquake or a “back-propagating rupture” may spread the intense shaking across a wider zone.
A team of scientists from the University of Southampton and Imperial College London recorded the observation back in 2016. Now, the observation had been published in Nature Geoscience. The journal is a major step in understanding the effect of it.
An earthquake at a magnitude of 7.1 was recorded along the Romanche fracture zone, a 900km long fault line under the Atlantic. The rupture was initially moved in one direction before turning around midway through the earthquake. A ‘boomerang’ earthquake is considered as a rare geological phenomenon to the scientists.
According to Yoshihiro Kaneko, a geophysicist of GNS Science in New Zealand, this is the first time this type of earthquake was reported.
‘Boomerang’ earthquakes also known as slow earthquakes don’t happen in a sudden but instead, progress slowly over days or even months.
Scientists are still studying the effect of this type of earthquake which can help in the predictions of future earthquakes. This study can also help the researchers in coming up with a better early-warning system for future earthquakes.
Sources:National Geographic, India Times