A rare earthquake in August 2021 wasn't two major ruptures as originally thought, but five—with one powerful and shallow enough to trigger a multi-ocean tsunami
South Georgia Island's historic whaling stations, like this one at Grytviken, have been abandoned, but the British Antarctic Survey maintains a research station at King Edward Point. The South Sandwich Islands, meanwhile, are currently uninhabited. There is no geophysical monitoring station on these islands and no ocean-bottom seismometers, making earthquakes there difficult to study.
Deep below the isolated South Sandwich Islands, the South American tectonic plate plunges beneath the South Sandwich plate at a modest speed of 2.8 inches a year. The uneven grind between these two plates causes stress to build up over time. Sometimes that stress is released in earthquakes—including the kind that can generate tsunamis.
“In a first-order sense, this is a single earthquake,” Hicks says. It was just complicated—and powerful. “It ruptured the vast proportion of this subduction zone.” The third rupture in the rock, however, sandwiched between the other four, stood out. Registering as a magnitude 8.2 event, it was extremely powerful, unleashing the majority of the entire five-part quake’s energy. It was also slow, taking 180 seconds to transpire. That was partly why it remained hidden for so long: The team wasn’t using the right kind of seismic searchlight.
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