Remember the Earthquake That Hit New York in 2024? Scientists Finally Found the Source

On April 5, 2024, a magnitude 4.8 earthquake struck Tewksbury, New Jersey. The shaking took an estimated 42 million people from Virginia to Maine by surprise—the East Coast certainly isn’t known for its seismic activity. Now, researchers have finally figured out where this bizarre quake came from, and its origin wasn’t what they expected. At first, the Ramapo Fault—the largest in the region—seemed like the obvious suspect, but the quake’s epicenter was located too far away and its orientation did not align with the earthquake signal. In a study published earlier this month in the journal JGR Solid Earth, researchers took a closer look. Their findings suggest this quake originated on a previously unmapped, immature fault zone in the New Jersey Highlands, now named the “Mountainville Fault.” “What we are learning through these findings is that subtle, immature faults may pose a greater seismic hazard than the prominent, large faults that we traditionally focus on when assessing the earthquake hazards of a region,” lead author Folarin Kolawole, a structural geologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, told Gizmodo in an email. “In fact, we are finding that the