Mid Atlantic 6.9 Earthquake today!

Mid Atlantic Trench slipped a bit wider I guess. Not really much risk of a Tsunami from that is there? It's VERY deep and the movement is horizontal.

Now if there nad been a big landslip or seabed lift, I would guess there would be a bigger wave effect with less seismic activity.

Happy for an expert to comment - I have no knowledge of the facts, just making what I think are sensible assumptions.
 
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It's VERY deep and the movement is horizontal.

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Errmm!! Well, actually 10kms (6.2 miles) is not very deep at all! It was about this depth which cause the Indonesian Tsunami in 2004.

Not sure about it being horizontal though, all it says is that the location can be horizontal, up to 3.2kms of the fix that was given.
 
Yes, but I think the vertical movement of the seabed was somewhere around 10 meters?? and very quick, which displaced a lot of water vertically causing the tsunami. A horizontal relative movement between two plates deep under the seabed would probably just shake things up a bit. On shore it could, at 6.9 Richter, demolish buildings, depending on the resonances it set up in such structures.
 
I agree that a side slip on shore would be devastating to buildings, but I think Iceland is the only place that the the mid-Atlantic tectonic seam is on the surface.

The plates are moving all the time, this is surely just a larger than normal slip.
 
The atlantic earth quake was only 1/3 of the strength of the Indonesian quake (Richter scale is logarithmic).The two earthquakes occured at different types of plate boundaries; diverging and converging. At a diverging boundary ( the mid atlantic ridge) the plate "glides" across the relativly fluid asthenosphere. At a converging boundary two cold, solid plates grate past each other.
 
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