No further earthquakes predicted in Jordan

AMMAN — No further major or minor earthquakes are currently predicted and Jordan’s location along the Syrian-African fault line causing the seismic activity should not provoke any worries, director of the Jordan Seismological Observatory (JSO) Mahmoud Qaryouti said.

During a second swarm of earthquakes that struck the northern and central areas of the Kingdom this week, JSO recorded 19 earthquakes between Wednesday’s evening and Thursday’s afternoon, Qaryouti told The Jordan Times.  

A series of nine “weakly felt” earthquakes were recorded in Irbid between 4:50am and 8:57am on Wednesday, the strongest measuring 4.2 on the Richter scale at a depth of ten kilometres.

Meanwhile, another sequence of earth shakes started at 10:45 pm on Wednesday on Lake Tiberias, continuing until Thursday, the strongest of which measured 4.7 on the Richter scale, he noted. 

 “All seismological observatories around the world cannot predict earthquakes but record them,” the director noted, stressing that JSO records similar seismic activity all the time, which people often do not notice. 

Earth shakes like those felt in Zarqa, Irbid, Jerash, Amman and Sahab this week are a result of Jordan’s location along the Syrian-African fault line, which runs along the western border, part of the Great Rift Valley. Approximately 6,000 kilometers in length, the fault line runs from Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley in Asia to Mozambique in southeastern Africa, he noted. 

Over the past 100 years, Jordan witnessed two strong earthquakes: the first in 1927 in Jericho-Palestine, which measured 6.3 on the Richter scale, and the second in 1995 in Aqaba measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale, the JSO director said during a phone interview.