Had a small glitch in the system this afternoon. I subscribe to the US Geological Service email list for earthquakes. This notice came in a short while ago:
First screwy thing to notice is the date - June 29th, 2025 - today is June 21st, 2017... Turns out that the data from The Great Santa Barbara Earthquake of 1925 was entered into the system by mistake.
From the Los Angeles Times:
False alarm: Caltech staffer accidentally sends alert for large 1925 Santa Barbara earthquake
A staffer at Caltech mistakenly sent out an alert for a large magnitude 6.8 earthquake off the Santa Barbara coast — from 1925.
The error happened when someone tried to correct the exact location of the Prohibition-era Santa Barbara earthquake, which happened 92 years ago.
From the Archives — June 1925: Earthquake devastates Santa Barbara »
The erroneous report went out at around 4:51 p.m. A closer look at the alert, however, would have shown that something was amiss. The time of the alert was dated June 29, 2025 at 7:42 a.m. But it corresponds with a real earthquake that occurred a century earlier.
“That’s a mistake. It’s not real,” said Caltech seismologist Egill Hauksson. He said that scientists at UC Santa Barbara had recently complained that earthquakes from the region were actually located about 6 miles from where records indicated.
Someone on Hauksson’s team made a change, which inadvertently sent an email out on the U.S. Geological Survey’s email server that typically sends alerts of new earthquakes.
In a statement posted on Twitter, the USGS said the revision of the 1925 earthquake was “misinterpreted by software as a current event. We are working to resolve the issue.”
Well... Shit happens. Very glad it was a false alarm - the 1925 one was serious but this area has been built up a lot in the 92 years and a repeat event would be catastrophic.
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