Christmas tremors in Amboseli

Tremor epicenter

Earth tremors have once again shaken Cynthia and her camp visitors in their camp chairs. Regular visitors to our site will remember the note on a series of seismic events back in July. This time, at 16:45 local time on 23rd December, there was just one 5.4 magnitude shock.

On the accompanying map, you can see that the epicenter was once again located close to Ol Donyo Lengai, the 'Mountain of God', the last active volcano in East Africa. The red star shows the spot, between the volcanic cones of Gelai and Kitubeine. Lengai is the cone in the lower left corner of the image at the southern end of Lake Natron, the black and white (soda crust) item on the lower left edge of the image. The view is a Google Earth image, looking obliquely from west to east. You can see Amboseli National Park as a pale green shape 107 km (67 mi) to the east, in the upper right part of the image, just beyond the yellow Tanzania-Kenya border. The big grey lump on the upper right edge of the image is Kilimanjaro.

About an hour earlier, there was a smaller tremor (mag. 5) 42 km (26 mi) west of Mombasa. Our earth never stops forming, no matter how much we mess around with her.