Canary Islands El Hierro seismic swarm breaches 700 events

July 30, 2011 – CANARY ISLANDS – Recently El Hierro volcano of the Canary Islands has been experiencing a seismic swarm beneath it, which as of yesterday reached to over 700 events. Most of these events have been at Magnitudes of around 2 (+/-0.5) and are clustered beneath El Hierro whilst the depths of these earthquakes have been roughly between 9 and 16 km for the most part, with the exception of a few shallower and deeper quakes, the shallowest of which has been around 4 km (as of 27/04/11 8am GMT for the plotted data below) but as shallow as 1 km following this. If we look at these earthquakes in two plots here we can see the clustering of these earthquakes is mainly confined to an oval area at 10 km depth. El Hierro is a broadly basaltic volcano which might have been active in 1793 although this is uncertain. –Earthquake Report

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