Qualla: 2014 Orkney Earthquake

2014 Orkney Earthquake: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit USGS, Public domain. At 12:22 on a winter afternoon in August 2014, the ground beneath the North West province of South Africa lurched, and the shaking spread for hundreds of kilometers. Office towers were evacuated in Pretoria. People felt it in Durban, on the distant coast, where the beach sand amplified the tremor. It reached across borders into Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique. At magnitude 5.5, it was the most powerful earthquake South Africa had experienced since 1969 - and yet, unusually, no fault deep in the earth had let go on its own. The most likely culprit lay just below the surface, in the labyrinth of tunnels that generations of miners had carved out of the rock in their long search for gold.

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Image: USGS | Public domain

2014 Orkney Earthquake: The Ground That Mining Made

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fletch54, CC BY-SA 3.0. The epicenter sat near Orkney, a gold-mining town in the Klerksdorp district, in a belt of the country where the earth trembles more often than most people realize. This is one of the most intensively mined regions on Earth, and the connection is not coincidental. According to Pr...

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Image: Fletch54 | CC BY-SA 3.0

2014 Orkney Earthquake: Warnings in the Rock

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Col André Kritzinger, CC BY-SA 3.0. The signs had been there. In March 2005, a seismic event at a mine in nearby Stilfontein killed two miners underground and forced the operation to close. The investigation that followed reached a sober conclusion: mining had caused it, and further seismic events would keep happen...

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Image: Col André Kritzinger | CC BY-SA 3.0

2014 Orkney Earthquake: One Life, Many Losses

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Col André Kritzinger, CC BY-SA 3.0. The earthquake claimed a single life, and his name was Leshomo Makhaola. He was thirty-one, a man from Lesotho, and he died when the wall of an old mining house collapsed on him in Kanana. It is worth pausing on that one death amid the dramatic talk of magnitudes and evacuated sk...

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Image: Col André Kritzinger | CC BY-SA 3.0

2014 Orkney Earthquake: After the Shaking

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Col André Kritzinger, CC BY-SA 3.0. When the worst had passed, the aftershocks kept coming - more than a thousand of them within a month, including one that struck Khuma the same afternoon as residents picked through the wreckage of their homes. The Council for Geoscience warned that they might continue for months....

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Image: Col André Kritzinger | CC BY-SA 3.0