As Australia does not sit anywhere near a fault line, how did it experience an earthquake today?
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I really liked the explanation given by Trevor Allen who is a seismologist with Geoscience Australia;
Imagine if you will, that a tectonic plate is analogous to a pavlova — with a thin brittle crust lying above a ductile, but mostly solid meringue mantle, the Australian continent would sit in the middle of our pavlova.
If you put your hands on the edge of the pavlova and start to squeeze, the crust around your hands will be the first to break, like those earthquakes at the boundaries of tectonic plates. But if you continue to squeeze, eventually strain builds up in the centre of the crust, and cracks will begin to appear.
This is similar to how we get earthquakes in Australia. The same forces that drive earthquakes on tectonic plate boundaries are at play — they just take a lot longer to manifest in the middle of our pavlova
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