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Dozens of Aftershocks Follow 6.9 Quake Off California Coast

EUREKA (CBS SF) -- Dozens of aftershocks, the strongest registering 4.6, continue to rattle Northern California and the Eureka coast following a powerful 6.9 quake offshore just after 10 p.m. Sunday night.

The U.S. Geological Survey reports thousands of calls reporting the shaking.  The data is mapped onto the image below, with green indicating moderate shaking around Eureka, and blue indicating weak shaking, as reported in San Francisco and Oakland, and as far away as Eugene, Oregon and Reno, Nevada.

shakemap

Nerves may be on edge this time of year.  It was just three years ago Tuesday that the 9.0 Kobe quake and tsunami sent a wall of water across the Pacific, destroyed entire cities in Japan, and triggered the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

The Sunday earthquake did not generate a tsunami, and aftershocks have not been strong enough to threaten the coast.

It hit on the San Andreas fault struck four miles below the sea floor, but the effects of the movement are triggering releases of energy in dozens of fractures around the area.  Simultaneously, there is a rise in activity around The Geysers, a continually active hot springs area, that could be just a coincidental rise in seismic activity.

Since 1900, eleven quakes with a magnitude of 6.5 or higher have hit within a 62-mile radius of Sunday's quake.

TRACK THE LATEST QUAKES: US Geological Survey Real-Time Quake Mapping

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