On Thursday nigh a magnitude-4.2 earthquake struck 100 kilometres off the coast of Cairns, about four hours later the northern New South Wales town of Grafton also started to shake.
Two east coast communities — 2,000 kilometres apart — woke to unusually similar news on Thursday morning.A magnitude-4.2 earthquake had struck 100 kilometres off the coast of Cairns and was felt by residents in the Far North Queensland city the night before.
To those who don't keep across the nation's quakes with a close eye it feels like a significant event, but can the two events tell us anything about seismic activity in Australia?The two earthquakes were on different fault lines, so despite being on the same tectonic plate and happening mere hours apart, they are separate events.The Australian tectonic plate has small cracks and fault lines right across the country and in surrounding ocean beds.
"The big faults are where the plate boundary is, where the Australian plate is colliding with the Pacific plate through Papua New Guinea and New Zealand," Geoscience Australia's senior seismologist Jonathan Bathgate said."We record more than 100 magnitude-3 earthquakes every year," Mr Bathgate said. "The earthquakes we've seen in Melbourne aren't that unusual, we get a number in that region and further to the east in the Gippsland area," Mr Bathgate said.
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