By Charles K Mark
President of Geological Society of South Sudan, Ajak John Ateng, has urged citizens not to panic about the mild earthquakes happening in the country.
The geologist reported that the weight of the occurrence of the latest earthquake shouldn’t cause alarm since it was shallow and not intense.
“And when you are talking about the shallow earthquake, it is an earthquake that has a magnitude of five downward,” Mr. Ajak explained.
He said an earthquake below five (5) magnitudes cannot cause destruction until it reaches the level of six (6) and above, and that is when citizens should start worrying.
Mr. Ajak lamented that most earthquakes happen due to tectonic movements, which he defined as the movement of the earth’s surface.
The geologist further said that when the surface moves, its plates move as well, and when the plates collide with each other, the earth shakes.
“It causes a lot of shaking on the surface of the heart. So those are the causes. I know it will, but we need to have detailed information,” Ajak advised.
The president of the Geological Society, however, decried that there is no adequate information or recording mechanisms to give verifiable information, making it hard to predict the occurrence.
“We need to have valid information whereby we say the train is going up, the train is going down, and then that’s where we can have such information put in place,” he said.
Ajak said that though it is unpredictable whether it increases or decreases, there is a worry that the earthquake occurrences are becoming more regular.
We have realized that it has happened once, but there’s a time people slept outside, and that one, we never took it seriously because there was no recorded information on that,” he concluded.
Ajak recalls that in 2022, an earthquake happened twice, and five times now in 2023.