Yesterday, a series of earthquakes, starting with a magnitude-6.1 event, shook Colombia’s capital city of Bogotá and other cities along the Eastern Cordillera.
By Albert Leonardo Aguilar Suarez, Ph.D. candidate, Stanford University
Citation: Aguilar, A.L., 2023, Earthquake Sequence Rattles Central Colombia, Temblor, http://doi.org/10.32858/temblor.317
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Yesterday, at 12:04 p.m. local time, a series of earthquakes struck central Colombia, near the city of Villavicencio. Ground motion was felt in the capital city of Bogotá, with shaking reported across the states of Meta and Cundinamarca. The Colombian Geological Survey (Servicio Geológico Colombiano) reported a magnitude of 6.1 for the mainshock. Within 30 minutes, the Survey reported aftershocks with magnitudes of 5.6 and 4.8.
People evacuated buildings in Villavicencio and Bogotá after the shaking, which was captured on many live cameras. Cosmetic damage to the capitol building in Bogotá has been reported. In the closest town to the mainshock epicenter, El Calvario, damages to homes and roads have been reported. One death has been reported as of this writing. Authorities continue to monitor the effects of these earthquakes. It is expected that thousands of smaller magnitude aftershocks will persist in the following days, weeks and months.
Colombia Tectonics
These earthquakes occurred at a shallow depth. The mainshock nucleated at a depth of around 15 kilometers, according to the Colombian Geological Survey. The aftershocks ruptured at depths of less than 30 kilometers. These events are most likely related to the Servitá Fault and its subsidiaries. These are mostly reverse faults, along which the Eastern Cordillera grows and moves at a rate of less than 1 centimeter per year (Mora-Paez et al., 2019).
The Eastern Cordillera – the easternmost mountain range of Colombia’s Andes – is a very seismically active region. Though it doesn’t boast megathrust earthquakes associated with offshore, coastal subduction zones, mountain building processes that ultimately result from Colombia’s complex subduction tectonics cause quakes like yesterday’s. Earthquakes here are expected.
Past earthquakes
Today’s mainshock’s epicenter is nearly 20 kilometers east of 2008’s magnitude-5.8 Quetame earthquake (Dicelis et al., 2016). One of the largest recent earthquakes near Bogotá – a city with a population of over 8 million people – killed 6 people in nearby towns, injured tens of people and left thousands homeless (Dicelis et al., 2016).
Also, 100 kilometers to the southwest, a magnitude-6.2 earthquake struck on Christmas in 2019, and was widely felt throughout Central Colombia. If one keeps digging into the seismic history of the region, there are abundant records of notable earthquakes going back to colonial times (Dimaté et al., 2005).
Unrelated event in earthquake-prone country
Some people have reported feeling a magnitude-4.8 earthquake a little over an hour after the mainshock. The event originated in Los Santos, Santander at a depth of 145 kilometers, and its epicenter is hundreds of kilometers away from Villavicencio. This event is very unlikely to be connected to the earthquakes in El Calvario, and is another example of how earthquakes can occur anywhere in Colombia, at any time.
These earthquakes are a reminder that though seismic activity cannot be predicted, earthquakes in Colombia are a part of life. They serve as a call to the public to keep an eye on official channels, such as the Servicio Geológico Colombiano.
References
Dicelis, G., Assumpção, M., Kellogg, J., Pedraza, P., & Dias, F. (2016). Estimating the 2008 Quetame (Colombia) earthquake source parameters from seismic data and InSAR measurements. In Journal of South American Earth Sciences (Vol. 72, pp. 250–265). Elsevier Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsames.2016.09.011
Dimaté, C., Rivera, L., & Cisternas, A. (2005). Re-visiting large historical earthquakes in the Colombian Eastern Cordillera. Journal of Seismology, 9(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10950-005-1413-2
Mora-Páez, H., Kellogg, J. N., Freymueller, J. T., Mencin, D., Fernandes, R. M. S., Diederix, H., LaFemina, P., Cardona-Piedrahita, L., Lizarazo, S., Peláez-Gaviria, J. R., Díaz-Mila, F., Bohórquez-Orozco, O., Giraldo-Londoño, L., & Corchuelo-Cuervo, Y. (2019). Crustal deformation in the northern Andes – A new GPS velocity field. Journal of South American Earth Sciences, 89, 76–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsames.2018.11.002
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