{"id":445210,"date":"2025-12-13T22:29:22","date_gmt":"2025-12-13T22:29:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/445210\/"},"modified":"2025-12-13T22:29:22","modified_gmt":"2025-12-13T22:29:22","slug":"earthquake-due-in-foreseeable-future-after-70-years-of-adelaide-tremors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/445210\/","title":{"rendered":"Earthquake due ‘in foreseeable future’ after 70 years of Adelaide tremors"},"content":{"rendered":"

Adelaide is considered to have a stable climate that rarely delivers destructive weather on a large scale, but beneath the surface lurks a serious danger.<\/p>\n

The City of Churches is the most earthquake-prone of Australia’s capitals.<\/p>\n

Its last major earthquake, which at the time was the most damaging on record in Australia, was in 1954.<\/p>\n

The magnitude-5.4 earthquake on March 1<\/a> resulted in three serious injuries, damaged more than 3,000 buildings, and resulted in about 30,000 insurance claims for collapsed or cracked walls, chimneys and smashed windows.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

A University of Adelaide newsletter rendition of the front cover of The News newspaper on the day of Adelaide’s 1954 earthquake. (Supplied: The News\/University of Adelaide)<\/p>\n

Professor Alan Collins from the University of Adelaide’s Tectonics and Earth Systems said another big one was almost certainly going to happen in his lifetime.<\/p>\n

“Whether it happens this year, or in 10 to 15 or 20 years, who knows, but it’s likely to happen in that sort of timeframe \u2014 so in the foreseeable future,” Professor Collins said.<\/p>\n

The university’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering estimated in 2011 that if a repeat of the 1954 earthquake was to occur in Adelaide that year, it would cause a billion dollars in damage.<\/p>\n

An active zone<\/p>\n

Adelaide is Australia’s most seismically active region.<\/p>\n

A number of faults run below the Greater Adelaide area, including the Willunga fault to the city’s south, the Para fault to the north, and the Eden-Burnside fault, which runs from near Seacliff into the Hills Face Zone.<\/p>\n

\"Man<\/p>\n

Alan Collins moved to SA due to geologically significant sites in Adelaide and the Flinders Ranges. (Supplied: Alan Collins)<\/p>\n

Professor Collins said there was even a fault that ran through Bonython Park towards Thebarton Theatre, “crossing the line to the new tunnel they’re drilling”.<\/p>\n

“That’s also an active fault, so they certainly had to consider that in the planning of the new tunnel [for the Torrens to Darlington project<\/a>].”<\/p>\n

The country itself sits atop the Indo-Australian tectonic plate, which includes the Indian subcontinent and about half of New Zealand, and moves about 7 centimetres north-east each year.<\/p>\n

“As we move north, we’re being pushed by a ridge in the middle of the Southern Ocean, just south of Adelaide, and we’re grinding into other plates and all that force passes through the plate,” Professor Collins said.<\/p>\n

“We’re in a weak zone within that plate, so when the forces get big enough from us grinding into those other plates, the weak rocks under Adelaide break and we create the Mount Lofty Ranges, which is exactly why they’re uplifted.”<\/p>\n

\"Craggy<\/p>\n

Evidence of the Willunga fault near Sellicks Beach, south of Adelaide. (ABC Radio Adelaide: Malcolm Sutton)<\/p>\n

He said the Mount Lofty Ranges had been constructed over about three million years by earthquakes, which could push the earth upwards by one to two metres in short bursts of power.<\/p>\n

“They do creep upwards as well, but it’s mainly from those earthquakes, and the staccato-like nature of the earth breaking,” Professor Collins said.<\/p>\n

Beachport rocked in 1897<\/p>\n

While the 1954 earthquake remains the state’s most destructive on record, its strongest was a magnitude-6.5 earthquake near Beachport in 1897.<\/p>\n

Earthquake activity shakes Adelaide, again<\/a><\/p>\n

Adelaide was shaken by two notable earth tremors in one month during 2022. One senior seismologist referred to a “cluster of events”\u00a0and said there were several factors at play.<\/p>\n

“A house at Wangolina, between Kingston and Robe, was wrecked, and in the ruin an infant was injured,” reported The Advertiser on May 11, 1897.<\/p>\n

“The reports from Beachport are most alarming, for there the post office and telegraph station have been wrecked, most of the chimneys knocked down and the earth opened in the main street, though the extent of the ‘hole in the ground’ is not given.”<\/p>\n

More recently on April 16, 2010, a magnitude-3.8 earthquake occurred in the Adelaide Hills from Mount Barker, shaking houses from the hills to the coast and making its presence felt as far away as Kangaroo Island.<\/p>\n

It was considered by Geoscience Australia to be a “larger than usual” quake along a fault line where tremors were expected.<\/p>\n

The latest tremors<\/p>\n

South Australia has experienced 126 earthquakes this calendar year so far, including three above magnitude-4 \u2014 two south-east of Hawker and one in the Lake Eyre region.<\/p>\n