What a wild 24 hours of weather!
Let's start off with 8.17am yesterday when a magnitude 5 earthquake shook WA's Goldfields, 10km southwest of Kargoolie. According to Geoscience Australia, we experience earthquakes of this magnitude in our country around once a year, but because they often occur in unpopulated regions they largely go unnoticed. That certainly wasn't the case in Kargoolie yesterday when food toppled off supermarkets shelves, and roofs turned to rubble in just ten terrifying seconds. The quake also forced the closure of Australia's larget gold mine, the Super Pit.
90% of all earthquakes occur on tectonic plate boundaries due to the movement of plates against eachother, so considering that Australia is situated smack bang in the middle of the Indo- Australia plate, this sort of earthquake comes as a shock. But fault lines within tectonic plates often cause such tremors, infact Geoscience Australia has measured around 20 small earthquakes in Australia in just the last month alone!
From rumbles in the earth to rumbles in the sky, severe storms barrelled across South Australia and Victoria yesterday bringing flash flooding thanks to large rain totals. Andamooka was hit by its second major storm in just two weeks with 38mm, while south-eastern suburbs in Melbourne such as Lyndhurst received 47mm. Today scattered showers and storms are possible in SA northeast of Coober Pedy to Port Augusta to Renmark, as well as central and eastern parts of Victoria. Some storms could be severe but are unlikely to be as volatile as yesterday.
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