A magnitude 5.7 earthquake on Friday struck the world’s largest active volcano — Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii — knocking items off shelves and cutting power in a nearby town, but not immediately prompting reports of serious damage.
The earthquake, which did not cause a tsunami and which the US Geological Survey initially reported as magnitude 6.3, was centered on Mauna Loa’s southern flank at a depth of 37km, 2km southwest of Pahala.
“It shook us bad to where it wobbled some knees a little bit,” said Derek Nelson, the manager of the Kona Canoe Club restaurant in the community of Kona, on the island’s western side. “It shook all the windows in the village.”
There was a power outage affecting about 300 customers in Naalehu that appeared to be related to the earthquake, Hawaiian Electric Co spokesperson Darren Pai said.
The earthquake struck after 10am, less than two hours before an unrelated quake with a preliminary magnitude of 4.6 shook Southern California.
Mauna Loa last erupted in late 2022. It is one of five volcanoes that make up the Big Island, which is the southernmost in the Hawaiian archipelago.
Earthquakes can occur in Hawaii for a variety of reasons, including magma moving under the surface.
In Friday’s case, the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said the likely cause was the weight of the Hawaiian Islands bending and stressing the Earth’s crust and upper mantle.
Helen Janiszewski, an assistant professor in the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Department of Earth Sciences, said the Hawaiian Islands lie on the Pacific oceanic tectonic plate and have some of the world’s biggest volcanoes.
“So there’s a huge amount of mass of rock associated with the islands and because of that, it’s actually enough to slightly displace the Pacific oceanic plate beneath the islands, and that force causes earthquakes sometimes” she said.
The observatory said Friday’s earthquake did not affect either Mauna Loa or a neighboring volcano, Kilauea.
There were no reports of damage to telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea, another nearby volcano that has some of the world’s most advanced observatories for studying the night sky.
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park spokesperson Jessica Ferracane said that while earthquakes are not uncommon, this one was “much more intense” than usual.
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