Earthquakes in the Canberra Region - Geoscience Australia

Earthquakes in the Canberra RegionA magnitude ML 2.4 earthquake, the largest in metropolitan Canberra during this period,occurred at 7.51 am Eastern Australian Summer Time on 29 November 1985. Theepicentre, shown in Figure 5, was in the Turner-Black Mountain area, where theearthquake was felt strongly. The numbers on the map are intensities on the ModifiedMercalli (MM) Scale (Appendix 1).Figure 5. Isoseismal map of the Canberra earthquake, magnitude ML 2.4, of 29November 1985 (local date). The red triangle is the epicentre. Reported MM intensityvalues and isoseismal contours are shown; intensity values of 0 indicate the earthquakewas not felt.At 2.07 am Eastern Australian Summer Time on 3 December 1990 a very smallearthquake occurred under the western part of Kambah. It was well recorded (Figure 6)on the Kambah seismograph, KBH, 3 km from the epicentre. An appeal made through thelocal media, who were quite excited by this small earthquake (Michael-Leiba, 1990),resulted in felt reports that are plotted on the isoseismal map (Figure 7) in MM intensityunits.7