Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Strong Earthquakes near CA-NV border

December 28, 2016

Three jolting earthquakes occurred in the wee hours this morning near Hawthorne NV, with two M5.7 events and a M5.5 occurring between the hours of 12:18 AM PST and 1:13 AM PST.

The earthquakes are related to movement along a NW striking regional fault zone known as the Walker Lane. As of this writing there have been 135 aftershocks, most in the M1-2 range. A similar sequence of earthquakes in April-May 2011 known as the "Hawthorne earthquake swarm" occurred in the same general area.

Although the earthquakes are near Nevada's Aurora-Bodie Volcanic Field (see map), the events are unlikely to be related to volcanic unrest. The lavas of Aurora-Bodie Volcanic Field look "young" but the most recent eruption was 110,000 years ago. The field has a history of eruptions that date as far back as 3.6 million years ago.

More information on the earthquake activity can be found on the University of Nevada, Reno website: http://www.seismo.unr.edu/Earthquake

Satellite image of the Aurora-Bodie Volcanic Field with December 28, 2016 Nevada earthquake swarm locations.

Get Our News

These items are in the RSS feed format (Really Simple Syndication) based on categories such as topics, locations, and more. You can install and RSS reader browser extension, software, or use a third-party service to receive immediate news updates depending on the feed that you have added. If you click the feed links below, they may look strange because they are simply XML code. An RSS reader can easily read this code and push out a notification to you when something new is posted to our site.