New Britain stays seismically active

We just had five M~5 earthquakes along the New Britain trench. The New Britain trench is formed by the subduction of the oceanic Solomon Sea microplate beneath the oceanic South Bismark microplate to the north.

    Here are the USGS web pages for these earthquakes that I plot on the map below:

  • 2015.05.03 M 5.2 20:21 UTC
  • 2015.05.03 M 5.6 22:32 UTC
  • 2015.05.03 M 5.5 22:35 UTC
  • 2015.05.03 M 5.1 22:50 UTC
  • 2015.05.03 M 5.2 23:40 UTC



I posted about the pair of M 6.7 & 6.8 earthquakes a couple days ago.
Earlier, I discussed seismicity from 2000-2015 here. The seismicity on the west of this region appears aligned with north-south shortening along the New Britain trench, while seismicity on the east of this region appears aligned with more east-west shortening. Here is a map that I put together where I show these two tectonic domains with the seismicity from this time period (today’s earthquakes are not plotted on this map, but one may see where they might plot).

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