Five earthquakes hit southwest Virginia in the space of a month

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Blacksburg, VA – Five earthquakes in one month – raise questions for a lot of people in southwest Virginia.

Two in Giles County, two in Carroll County, and one in Craig.

Don’t panic, said Martin Chapman, a professor of geophysics at Virginia Tech.

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“Virginia has its fair share of earthquakes,” Chapman said.

For example, the mineral earthquake that shook the East Coast in 2011.

“I just came out of the blue,” Chapman said.

But he admits that this amount of activity is a bit unusual.

“Normally, once every six months, we would have a big earthquake in Virginia that we would feel,” he said.

Where we’ve been seeing the earthquakes is in the Giles County seismic zone – according to Chapman. Meaning, it is prone to more activity.

“The seismic zone in Giles County is called that because in 1897, we had a five-magnitude earthquake, and it was a five-and-a-half magnitude earthquake,” he said.

Since then, he says, we’ve seen earthquakes in that area, although most of them are not of that magnitude.

Sometimes a series of small earthquakes is a precursor to a larger earthquake, but Chapman says they are hard to predict.

“I can’t just sit here and tell you that these things aren’t a bad omen. That’s what these people are talking about. Sometimes bigger earthquakes are caused by smaller ones, and they’re called earthquakes.

He says that although these small earthquakes are common, be aware.

“I think any time you have a smaller earthquake, you have to have an increased awareness of earthquakes in general,” he said.

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