Glitch or intern? US Geological Survey sends out false earthquake alert

United States authorities, on Monday, pushed out an alert about a 6.5 magnitude earthquake in Canada’s British Columbia. However, it turns out that the quake never occurred, leaving many people confused.

The alert, which was sent out by United States Geological Survey, was false, according to government seismologist, The Globe and Mail reported.

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The alert about a 6.5 magnitude earthquake hitting Canada flashed due to a technical glitch by the United States Geological Survey, Alison Bird of Natural Resources Canada says.

Alison Bird added that the systems used to process such data work on multiple parameters and are not always completely accurate. She further explained that there was a possibility of two small earthquakes, which occurred at two different locations, were registered into the system as one and were hence detected as one event.

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The United States Geological Survey also released a statement clarifying the situation after the confusion. The statement read, “This alert was falsely generated by an automatic system. It was quickly confirmed to be false and manually deleted. We will update this page when we know details of the error”, according to reports from Sputnik.

There have reportedly been five small scaled earthquakes in British Columbia over the last week that registered in seismological systems, according to reports from Sputnik citing Earthquake Track.

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The last substantial quake reported by the authorities of Canada occurred about 6 kilometers away from the city of Victoria, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island. The quake, which was reported on August 13 earlier this year, was recorded at a magnitude of 2.0. 

The alert sent out by the United States Geological Survey were pulled back soon after they were published. However, they left many social media users confused.