South Pole shakes its booty On New Years eve

Didn't know the South Pole had any seismic history or not , but found this interesting only because of its location or not.
hisz.rsoe.hu...

Is this a first?
I couldn't find any historical data for this area.

It's a quake from the future!

Date-Time [UTC]: Monday, 31th December 2013 at 08:02 PM
Local Date/Time: Tuesday, December 31, 2013 at 06:02 at night at epicenter

It partied so hard there that it registered on seismos a year in the past

This is one area that I've truthfully never considered when it comes to seismic activity. Now, realistically, since it's near Mt Erebus, and Mount Erebus is an active volcano, it's probably more common for shaking to occur in that general area than we realize.

Actually, it looks much further from the McMurdo area than I initially thought. I may just want to plug the coordinates into Google Earth, these two distance measurements don't mesh up the way I thought (I thought the comma was a period at first glance)

1,855 km (0.62 miles) SE of McMurdo Station, Antarctica

*scratches head* Now that I've looked closer, I don't understand how I thought it was 1.855 km in the first place. Serves me right for not looking closely, I guess.

reply to post by OrionsWitness

I've got the Palmer Station heliplot as part of a website display box and am used to seeing anything from a constant state of vibration to lines that look like a whole crowd of people is jumping up and down on the floor next to the seismograph. It's similar to Wake Island or Johnston Atoll for how it looks with the constant ....drunken buzz...is the best way to describe what I normally see on that display. In fact, I have it in my set as an example of what screwed up ones, by local conditions, tend to look like. lol....

Clearly defined quakes aren't something I'm used to seeing...but on the other hand.. they do have them occasionally. Particularly along the central mountains as I've come to see them over time.

Of course someone who does this professionally may pop up next to trashcan all I said with geologic fact and detail but that's my observations from a over a year watching it pretty much daily, anyway.

* Here ya go.. I never link my sites here (T&C as well as respect) but this is the USGS page directly to the Palmer Station Data Feed, Looks busy.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000

Thanks for the link, this how we are all educated and learn, the more good quality links the better.
Information shared is information that cares.
Ok all you ad men , send the royalty checks via ATS.
But Iam probably the 1000th person to have thought of that line in the last hour.
Just in case Iam wrong it is copyrighted to the person behind orionswitness.

Originally posted by OrionsWitness
Didn't know the South Pole ...

Its only 61 degrees south.
Much the same as the northern edge of Canada, or the southern edge of Alaska.

As far as date and time go, it coincides with this: earthquake.usgs.gov...

M5.2 - Balleny Islands region 2012-12-31 20:02:04 UTC

Though there are a few thousand miles separating that and Palmer Station.

reply to post by abecedarian


I think I should just call it a night. I glossed over the Balleny Islands quake on the USGS trying to hunt down this mysterious 2013 quake, and never connected the dots. :headdesk:

reply to post by Nyiah


No worries.

Time zones always screw me up, and toss in the new year thing and I'll be glassy eyed for a while.

Type: Earthquake
27 minutes ago
Magnitude: 5.7
DateTime: Tuesday January 1 2013, 07:35:50 UTC
Region: Kuril Islands
Depth: 48.7 km
Source: USGS Feed

We had a Mag 5 quake about 3am today 1st Jan here in NZ and look at the sky this evening - the strangest cloud formation I've seen. We do get some beautiful sunsets here but this is just plain weird!



Don't know if this will work or not????