Sudan’s El Gedaref jolted by 4.4 quake
The Sudanese city of El Gedaref was jolted by an earthquake that measured 4.4. on the Richter scale in the early hours of Monday morning. No damage or casualties have been reported.
The General Authority for Geological Research announced in a statement that the Seismic Monitoring Centre at the Jebel Awlia Station in south-west Khartoum, which is 342 kilometres away from the epicentre of the earthquake, monitored the tremor at 03:54:16 local time. The seismic action that caused the quake was at a depth of 10 kilometres.
File photo
The Sudanese city of El Gedaref was jolted by an earthquake that measured 4.4. on the Richter scale in the early hours of Monday morning. No damage or casualties have been reported.
The General Authority for Geological Research announced in a statement that the Seismic Monitoring Centre at the Jebel Awlia Station in south-west Khartoum, which is 342 kilometres away from the epicentre of the earthquake, monitored the tremor at 03:54:16 local time. The seismic action that caused the quake was at a depth of 10 kilometres.
The director of the Geological Monitoring Centre in El Gedaref, Khaled El Daw, said that the tremor is considered shallow, with a depth ranging between 8 to 10 kilometres, and there were no cracks in buildings, ground cracks, nor significant material losses.
The earthquake on Monday that struck El Gedaref – which is geologically on the western fringe of the East African Rift Valley* seismic system – is the second of its kind this year. Three months ago, the region witnessed a similar surface tremor at the same sites and at the same depths.
The Commission stated that the testimony of people in the region also confirmed that a quake of similar magnitude occurred during the 1940s.
El Daw called on the Presidency of the General Authority for Geological Research in Khartoum to expedite the establishment of the seismic monitoring station in the area of Bila in El Gedaref, which is one of the important centres in the national seismic monitoring network in Sudan.
active volcanoes(red triangles) and the Afar Triangle (shaded, centre)
a so-called triple junction (or triple point), where three plates
are pulling away from one another: the Arabian Plate,
and the two parts of the African Plate (the Nubian and the Somali)
splitting along the East African Rift Zone.
The red triangles show historically active volcanoes. (USGS)
*East African Rift Valley:
The East African Rift Valley (EAR) is a developing divergent plate boundary in East Africa. Here the eastern portion of Africa, the Somalian plate, is pulling away from the rest of the continent, that comprises the Nubian plate. The Nubian and Somalian plates are also separating from the Arabian plate in the north, thus creating a ‘Y’ shaped rifting system. These plates intersect in the Afar region of Ethiopia at what is known as a ‘triple junction’. (Source: The Geological Society of London).
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