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The U-S Geological Survey says a magnitude 3.7 earthquake occurred a little before midnight last night along the Nebraska-South Dakota near Ardmore, SD...26 miles southwest of Hot Springs, 29 miles west of Chadron, and 20 miles northeast of Crawford.
The USGS says the quake took place 3.1 miles below the surface. No damage was reported, but residents in all 3 towns reported feeling the shaking. One Crawford woman says she was awaken by her windows rattling, then felt her bed shaking. She estimates it lasted about 20 seconds.
Geophysicist Don Blakeman of the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo., says a 3.7 magnitude earthquake is large enough to be felt, but not to cause any serious damage.
For more information on this earthquake and earthquakess in general, go to the USGS website at http://earthquake.usgs.gov.
Chadron State College adjunct professor of geoscience Jennifer Balmat says the quake involved a recently-discovered deep-seated fault she recently discovered as part of her master's thesis...which was finished in June.
Balmat studied lineaments...faintly colored lines in the landscape that appear on satellite images and aerial photos. She discovered that most of the lineaments shown between Chadron and the Black Hills were how faults appeared on the surface.
Balmat says many of the faults extended downward several miles into so-called basement rocks — deep granite and schist similar to the rock that makes up the exposed portion of the central Black Hills. Sunday's earthquake was the 5 recorded near the same lineament since 1975....all with magnitudes between 3 and 4.
Relatively little is known about faults in Nebraska because there's little on the surface to indicate their presence, but Balmat's work shows they can be detected using simple tools such as satellite imaging.
She says while some of the well-defined lineaments in the Chadron area indicate faults that can...and do...produce earthquakes, it's highly unlikely those quakes would be strong enough to cause damage...magnitude 5 or larger -- is extremely low, scientists say.
Still, Balmat thinks it's important to keep identifying and studying faults in northwestern Nebraska and southwestern South Dakota because of their possible impacts on groundwater resources in the region.
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