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IPFS News Link • Natural Disasters

Arizona earthquake: What happened? Your questions answered here

• http://www.azcentral.com

Some people were jolted from their beds or couches. Others were sound asleep, but woke to a jolt when they checked the news Monday morning.

Either way, Sunday night's 4.1-magnitude earthquake near Black Canyon City and the other jitters during the evening left many wondering: What on earth is going on in Arizona?

We talked to the experts to try to break things down — about earthquakes in general, and about the Black Canyon City quake in specific.

What caused the earthquake? What fault line was it on?

THE BOTTOM LINE: We can't yet say what fault line shook, but we shouldn't be shocked.

"The big picture is Arizona is not far away from the tectonic plate boundary in California," said Edward Garnero, an Arizona State University professor of geophysics with a concentration in seismology. "That's a lot of deformation and earthquake faulting happening close to us. We get some of that activity here because our state is also experiencing some deformation from the earth below. Arizona actually has a lot of earthquake faults. However, they are such that they don't go off very often, and they tend to be not very big."


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