An earthquake measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale shook northern Ethiopia on Friday January 3. Although no injuries have yet been reported, several thousand people are being evacuated due to the increasing seismic activity recorded in the region.
Since September, no less than 67 earthquakes and tremors have been recorded in this area of east-central Ethiopia. This is particularly the case in the Fentale region which is part of the main Ethiopian Rift Valley, a vast fracture zone of the earth’s crust where geological phenomena are particularly intense.
For months, the local population has been observing “increasingly strong” tremors, some of which were even felt as far away as the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, although located 230 km away. “This sequence is worrying because the magnitudes are increasingly strong,” notes a seismologist at the Strasbourg Earth Sciences School and Observatory, cited by RFI.
– Advertisement-
