Most quakes experienced are linear, but this one is a weird boomerang earthquake that was detected in the deep Atlantic Ocean. This kind of quake is rare and seeing it gives insight into one of the most eccentric earth phenomena.
In 2010, in Baja California, the house of a Rosario García González was the scene of the oddest sights anyone can see. The witness saw the earth crack open and travel forward, but at some point, it doubled back and boomeranged its origin, reported National Geographic.
When scientists heard of the boomeranging tremor, they were eager to have first-hand sights of what happened. One of them is Orlando Teran, who is connected to the Ensenada Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education. He had the interest in verifying the event that contradicted everything about quakes as an exciting science that needs to be investigated.
So, the quest to get data on the unusual tremors is on the roll. They've hit pay dirt and captured one in detail. It was what it is and they saw the quake double back and collected data on the phenomena.
One of these tremors that roundabout is a 7.1 earthquake under the Atlantic seafloor, triangulated at 650 miles from the Liberian coast off western Africa. Initially, the quake powered eastward and upwardly, but it stopped in its tracks and past the topmost part of the fault-line. It moved and turned at the speed of sound, like an Earthen-sonic boom in the crustal plates.
Most tremblors will radiate in a linear direction from start to end. But Boomerang quakes always reverses in a back-propagating rupture that will shake more parts of the crust. Mechanics of these abnormal tremors is yet to be understood, how they happen, and what dangers it has for everyone.
“Studies like this help us understand how past earthquakes ruptured, how future earthquakes may rupture, and how that relates to the potential impact for faults near populated areas," said Kasey Aderhold, a seismologist who studies the phenomena.
One of the most recent boomerang type tremors has struck the mid-ocean ridge in the Atlantic, where a gap between the South American and African tectonic plates are moving slowly. To collect data for the scientific world, scientists used 39 seismometers close to the ridge to construct a model to visualize it back in 2016.
Scientists got lucky and a magnitude 7.1 was registered. The quake affected the Romanche Fracture Zone, according to Stephen Hicks an earthquake seismologist, and an author of the new study.
Several months later, the magnitude 7.1 quake rumbled. The temblor struck on a nearby fault in what's known as the Romanche Fracture Zone, says Stephen Hicks, an earthquake seismologist at the Imperial College London and the lead of the study.
He was not sure about the data from the Romanche Fracture Zone if it zinged back to its original point. With the help of Ryo Okuwaki of the University of Tsukuba, he confirmed that it did boomerang after analysis of the data.
Computer modeling shows that it started deep in the crust and ran eastward to the mid-ocean ridge. There it bounced back to top shoulder of the fault structures. The record shows 11,000 miles per hour at ultrasonic speeds which is a destructive force.
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