Breaking: Catastrophic earthquakes strike Venezuela
France sets all-time record hottest day for second consecutive day
Earlier this evening, a sequence of massive earthquakes struck near the coast of Venezuela. An initial M7.2 earthquake was immediately followed within a minute by a M7.5 earthquake centered west of Caracas. The NWS issued a tsunami advisory for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands for the the threat of minor tsunami activity, but this risk has passed and the advisory has been canceled.
I am not a seismologist or geophysicist and am not going to try to be — but as an earth science Substack I do want to share some resources about this major event. The US Geological Survey (USGS) is the primary US science agency responsible for earthquakes, and their webpage for this event has extensive information.
This includes probabilistic estimates of fatalities and economic losses from PAGER, a system to provide decision makers with an initial sense of impacts (and a system I got some exposure to at NSSL as part of our FACETs effort to develop similar products for weather events). You can see that even the best case scenario for estimated fatalities implies a dire situation — and the worst case is truly horrifying.
USGS also produces an aftershock forecast, which shows that it is almost a certainty that a M5 aftershock will occur in the next week, with about a 1 in 2 chance of an additional M6 earthquake. Given the extensive damage that is expected and already known, earthquakes of this intensity could cause significant additional damage to vulnerable infrastructure and buildings.
Earthquake geologist Dr. Wendy Bohon has a great BlueSky feed of earthquake science, and she has an incredibly informative thread up about the Venezuelan earthquakes. Drs. Judith Hubbard and Kyle Bradley have a great Substack about earthquakes, and just posted extensive scientific information as well as firsthand information from a colleague in Caracas.
Turning to the other big story I wanted to update about tonight — the European heat wave — France set a record for its highest daily national average temperature for the second day in a row.
The UK Met Office reported that Gosport on the coast of the English Channel preliminarily broke the record for hottest temperature ever observed in the UK in June when it reached 36.1C (97F) this afternoon. Climatologist M. Herrera reported on his Extreme Temperatures Around the World BlueSky feed that nearly all stations in the Benelux region set June record maximum temperatures today, including 37.9C (100F) at Potaschberg which set a new national June record (again) for Luxembourg.
Most of these records will likely be broken multiple times in the next few days, and potentially all-time record heat is still expected to shift into central and eastern Europe by this weekend.
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Terrifying news for Venezuela.