They’re not called the shaky isles for nothing. New Zealand experienced a record breaking 32,828 earthquakes in 2016. There were also 80,000 landslides, two tsunamis, and a volcanic eruption to cap off a year described by GeoNet as “the groundbreaker”. The previous biggest year was 2011 – the year of the deadly Christchurch earthquake – when 29,000 were recorded, compared to the usual average of 20,000 a year. “You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who wasn’t impacted,
in some way, by earthquakes in New Zealand this year,” GeoNet’s Sara McBride wrote in a blog post. Usually quake-immune Auckland felt the ground rumble during the first of two magnitude seven quakes. Normally the country only gets one earthquake a year above a magnitude seven, so when a 7.1 hit the northeast coast in September causing minimal damage on land, many thought that box had been ticked. READ MORE
