Science of the Magnitude 5.0 Mentone (TX) earthquake (March 26, 2020)_UTD GEONEWS

To learn more about the potential faulting system around the area, you may want to check this paper out: https://www.researchgate.net/publicat... (Thanks for our YouTube friend's sharing) Hi, I’m Ali Sealander with UTD Geonews and I’m here to tell you about a temblor that tickled Texas recently. A little after 10 in the morning on March 26, a moderate earthquake struck far West Texas, about 25 miles west of the small town of Mentone (slide 2). No serious damage was done, partly because it was a moderate earthquake (slide 3), magnitude 5, and partly because the earthquake happened in the sparsely populated Chihuahuan desert (slide 4). Only 19 people live in Mentone, the only community in Loving County, Texas. Few people live in this region because it is a desert. People in El Paso TX, (slide 5) 175 miles away, said it felt like a large train was passing nearby. Even though this was a pretty modest earthquake as earthquakes go, it was one of the strongest earthquakes that Texas has experienced in the past 150 years (Slide 6). The earthquake occurred in a region of low seismic risk (slide 7) compared to regions to the west and in Oklahoma and in the central Mississippi River valley to the NE. What do we know about this earthquake? The earthquake occurred in a region known as the Permian Basin (Slide 8). The Permian Basin filled with up to 25,000 feet or 7.6 kilometers (Slide 9) of sediment and contains some of the richest oil deposits in the world. According to the United States Geologic Survey (Slide 9), the earthquake occurred 6.6 km (22,000 feet) below the surface and was due to normal faulting on an E-W fault, indicating that N-S stretching caused the fault to slip. There is no obvious candidate for the fault that moved to cause this earthquake (Slide 11), although faults that trend approximately E-W occur in the region. Smaller earthquakes or aftershocks continue so the region seems to be settling back to normal. Scientists, however, have a lot of work left to do, especially to figure out if the earthquake was caused by natural stresses in Earth’s crust or if it was induced, caused by injecting wastewater deep into the Permian Basin sedimentary rocks. We hope you enjoyed this GeoNews video. Until next time, stay safe!