While Colorado isn’t often considered a prime location for earthquakes, temblors can and do occur in the state every year. Many are in less populous locations but can be damaging. Our revamped earthquake page(s) help you keep tabs on the rumbling earth.
We revamped our main earthquake page to now include an interactive Google map and realtime list of quakes. This shows quakes of magnitude 2.0 or greater over the past 7 days within a 500 mile radius of Thornton as reported by the United States Geological Survey (USGS).
Other locations on the globe are certainly more prone to devastating quakes. To help view these events which occur with startling frequency, we created a global earthquake page. This shows all magnitude 4.0 temblors within the past 7 days.
Both of these pages are available via the links below or in the almanac menu to the left.
While normally not particularly active, there are approximately 100 potentially active faults in Colorado and more than 400 temblors of magnitude 2.5 have occurred in the state since 1870. The state’s largest quake occurred on November 7, 1882 along the northern Front Range and measured 6.6 on the Richter Scale.
According to the Colorado Division of Emergency Management, the costliest quake was a 5.5 magnitude temblor that occurred on August 9, 1967 and was centered near Commerce City. The quake caused more than $1 million worth of damage and is thought to have been caused by the injection of liquid waste into the earth at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal.
Longtime Denver area residents well remember the shaking that occurred with regularity from the mid-60s through the early 80s due to the activity at the Arsenal.