The key facts
- On the night of November 10, residents of five Ukrainian cities reported tremors
- There is no official earthquake data from seismological services
- Geologist Ryabinkin considers the man-made version most likely but does not rule out a natural one
What happened
On the night of November 10, residents of five Ukrainian cities at once — Kyiv, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Dnipro and Cherkasy — reported unusual underground tremors: according to eyewitnesses, walls and windows shook, doors opened, plaster crumbled, dishes rattled, and some heard a loud rumble resembling an explosion. However, neither the Ukrainian seismological service nor the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre recorded an earthquake: there is no corresponding entry on the website of the Ukrainian Main Special Control Centre, and the European centre issued only a preliminary report without a magnitude, depth or epicentre coordinates. This was reported by Life.ru.
Versions of the cause
Geologist and research fellow at the Institute of Tectonics and Geophysics of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences Konstantin Ryabinkin, in a conversation with Life.ru, spoke in favour of a man-made nature of the event: according to him, the absence of official data from seismologists in Ukraine and European countries most likely indicates a human-made character of the tremors. He suggested that, amid the hostilities, explosions could have occurred at underground weapons depots. At the same time, the specialist did not rule out a natural origin: central and northern Ukraine belong to zones of relatively low seismic activity, where intraplate faults exist, and earthquakes there are possible but far less active than, for example, in the Carpathians (up to six or seven points) or in the Far East, where activity is higher due to the interaction of lithospheric plates. The cause of the event remains undetermined.
