At approximately 6:55 am ET Alaska was struck by a 6.8 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Mostly a remote area with the exception of a little town named Atka. Home to around 60 people the town is around 100 miles from the epicenter. There were no reports of damages or injuries. The USGS issued a tsunami warning for the area which was later called off. This isn’t the first quake in this area which is frequented by them quite often. Earthquakes in this area normally go unreported because they are either to far out to sea or to deep in the earth’s crust.
This earthquake compared to Haiti’s earthquake (back in January of 2010 measured as a 7.0m) had a lot less catastrophic effects. Mostly because it was in a remote area as opposed to a heavily populated Urban city. It is mostly said that it isn’t the earthquakes that do the damage it is the triggered events after them like tsunamis and fires that cause the damages. A perfect example of this is the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami which killed 230,000 people and caused 1.69 million people to be displaced from their homes. The earthquake that caused this event measured in between 9.0 and 9.3m and is the third largest earthquake ever recorded on a seismograph.
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