Earthquake due ‘in foreseeable future’

February 2026 Adelaide is considered to have a stable climate that rarely delivers destructive weather on a large scale, but beneath the surface lurks a serious danger. The City of Churches is the most earthquake-prone of Australia’s capitals. Its last major earthquake, which at the time was the most damaging on record in Australia, was in 1954. The magnitude-5.4 earth-quake on March 1 resulted in three serious injuries, damaged more than 3,000 buildings, and resulted in about 30,000 insurance claims for collapsed or cracked walls, chi- mneys and smashed windows. Professor Alan Collins from the University of Adelaide’s Tectonics and Earth Systems said another big one was almost certainly going to happen in his lifetime. “Whether it happens this year, or in 10 to 15 or 20 years, who knows, but it’s likely to happen in that sort of timeframe — so in the foreseeable future,” Professor Collins said. The university’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering estimated in 2011 that if a repeat of the 1954 earthquake was to occur in Adelaide that year, it would cause a billion dollars in damage. Adelaide is Australia’s most seismically active region. A number of faults run below the Greater Adelaide area, including the Willunga fault to the city’s south, the Para fault to the north, and the Eden-Burnside fault, which runs from near Seacliff into the Hills Face Zone. Professor Collins said there was even a fault that ran through Bonython Park towards Thebarton Theatre, “crossing the line to the new tunnel they’re drilling”. “That’s also an active fault, so they certainly had to consider that in the planning of the new tunnel [for the Torrens to Darlington project].” The country itself sits atop the Indo-Australian tectonic plate, which includes the Indian subcontinent and about half of New Zealand, and moves about 7 centimetres north-east each year. “We’re in a weak zone within that plate, so when the forces get big enough from us grinding into those other plates, the weak rocks under Adelaide break and we create the Mount Lofty Ranges, which is exactly why they’re uplifted.” He said the Mount Lofty Ranges had been constructed over about three million years by earthquakes, which could push the earth upwards by one to two metres in short bursts of power. “They do creep upwards as well, but it’s mainly from those earthquakes, and the staccato-like nature of the earth breaking,” Professor Collins said. Source: abc.net.au/news/sa

Greek Tribune Adelaide, South Australia