But no serious injury or damage was reported. Although temblors that size occur about 800 times per year worldwide, they strike here only once every couple of hundred years, seismologists say. A magnitude-5 or greater quake likely won't recur here for another century, they said. But if and when it does strike, it could wreak havoc because so many millions of people and thousands of buildings are now crammed together. There has been so much development since the last magnitude-5 quake in 1884, that even though the probability of another is low, if you measure risk . . .
Few people know, but New Jersey and New York sit on a highly active earthquake zone.
The area, in fact, ranks fourth nationally behind Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle in quake activity, though the degree of severity is much lower here, Lerner-Lam said. The keys to all this local rumbling are the Ramapo fault in North Jersey and the so-called 125th Street fault across Manhattan. In New York, the 125th Street fault begins just south of the George Washington Bridge on the Hudson and heads through Harlem, then south across Central Park and the upper East Side, across the East River, and under Queens. Each station has a seismometer, an instrument that pinpoints a quake by measuring the movement in the earth and combining it with the exact time, which it receives from a satellite. Another active area of the country is in Missouri, where four great earthquakes struck in 1811 and 1812, leveling the town of New Madrid and changing the course of the Mississippi River.