It was around 8am today that tremors were felt in Reunion Island.
If the density was too low for some, others had a big fright.
“2 on the Richter scale, so it’s nothing, my dog snores louder than that”
“It’s nothing at all, you can’t feel that, that’s impossible. It’s them with their machine and everything, now it’s possible.”
“It moved just as it should. I thought it was just doors like usual, but alas no, it was a real earthquake!”
“Around 8:30 we heard something like a wind, go and see, it wasn’t a wind, it was a big boom”
A few kilometers away, at Rivière des Galets in the commune of Le Port, Virginie was drinking her coffee, sitting here, when she felt the tremors.
“I felt a vibration, as if it was shaking. The apartment shook, the chair too, so at the time we didn’t understand, because I wasn’t alone, I got up, I said: maybe there’s a lottery, it’s against the building. Anyway, you can’t imagine an earthquake.”
Low magnitude earthquakes are felt 3 times a year in Reunion. This phenomenon is linked to small faults that are located deep in the oceanic crust.
“These earthquakes are on a fault plane that is well defined and this fault plane can be linked either to the pressure exerted by the Piton des Neiges edifice on the oceanic crust, or by regional constraints.”
This is a common phenomenon, the observatory records earthquakes on this fault every month, usually too weak to be felt.
