A deep and powerful earthquake Friday beneath the Pacific in the Northern Mariana Islands sent a seismic wave coursing more than 5,200 miles through the Earth, triggering an automated quake-detection system in Menlo Park that swiftly reported six smaller temblors in California reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

 

David Oppenheimer, a seismologist and project chief of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Northern California Seismic Network, said all 430 seismometers in the region caught the temblor’s first seismic wave 12 minutes after the Pacific quake struck at 5:39 a.m.

 

The network’s highly sophisticated central computer software instantly reported that six local quakes had struck at California locations ranging from Emeryville to Yosemite and with magnitudes ranging from 3.8 to 4.2.

Almost immediately - when software analysis indicated that two quakes with the same magnitude had apparently hit at virtually the exact same location within five seconds - the computer caught the problem and the local earthquake reports were instantly deleted, Oppenheimer said.

Read it here: Pacific Earthquake