Earthquakes you would have felt here
Every quake near enough and big enough to have been felt in Christchurch, from GeoNet.
The sequence the big ones, 2010–2016
Every magnitude-5.4-or-greater quake in the Canterbury box between the first big one in September 2010 and the Valentine’s Day one in 2016, the biggest of each cluster is the row, or the 22nd of February would read as three separate earthquakes. From GeoNet’s catalogue, live, and the whole catalogue, every magnitude-3+ shake since the fault opened, is counted month by month at /sequence; the fault it opened on, drawn trace by trace, at /faults. The story in plain language: the earthquakes explainer; what the ground did with it: the liquefaction explainer.
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Tue, 1 Sept, 9:21 am EarthquakesMagnitude 2.6 earthquake
22 km deep · 22 km from the city
North-west of the city
What this actually is
The filter is the whole story. GeoNet publishes an MMI for every quake, but that is the intensity at the epicentre, a magnitude-2 rockfall under Arthur’s Pass scores the same 3 as something that rattled Riccarton, so filtering on it fills the page with quakes nobody here felt. This asks a different question: would you have felt it, in this city? Magnitude falls off fast with distance, so the test is distance-aware, 2.5 within 40 km, 3.5 out to 100, 4.5 as far as Kaikōura and the Alps. Those bands match what GeoNet’s own felt-reports show for Canterbury. This page reaches back ninety days, which the front page cannot: GeoNet’s live endpoint covers about two days, so a page called “earthquakes you would have felt here” built on it alone is empty on most days of the year. It is joined to quakesearch, which has the whole record, the live rows win where the two overlap, because they are the ones that carry GeoNet’s own place name. Older rows get a direction computed from the coordinates rather than a town, because an epicentre thirty kilometres out is not *in* anywhere, and naming the nearest settlement would put a quake in a place it was not.
Read live from GeoNet. This page refreshes itself every minute while the tab is open.
Elsewhere in the city
Also in the earthquakes
- The sequenceevery shake since 2010, counted
- The faultsthe traces under the plains
- Liquefactionthe ground that moved
- The land gradesTC1, TC2, TC3
- The red zonethe land the Crown wrote off
- The rebuild’s receiptsSCIRT’s photograph archive
- The earthquakes, explainedwhat happened and why
- Liquefaction, explainedwhy the east failed
- The rebuild, explainedthe machinery that put it back
Questions, answered briefly
Every quake near enough and big enough to have been felt in Christchurch, from GeoNet.
GeoNet: read live, newest first.
The stream re-asks the source every minute while the page is open; the rows a crawler reads are the last bake, refreshed daily.