Abstract
EARTH tremors shook the whole district of the Gold Coast, Ashanti, Dahomey and Western Nigeria in West Africa from about 7.10 p.m. on June 22 to 4 a.m. on June 23. It is not yet clear whether there were several shocks of approximately equal dimensions from one or several closely situated epicentres, or whether there was one large earthquake with precursors and aftershocks. With the evidence available at the moment, the latter appears to be the most probable as the greatest impact of the earthquake was felt at Accra (5° 30’ N., 0° 10’ W.), Cape Coast (5° 5’ N., 1° 0’ W.), and Sekondi (4° 53’ N., 1° 48’ W.) at 7.15 p.m. on June 22. If the intensity of the shock was the same at each of these three places, as the immediately available evidence seems to indicate, then the epicentre was near 5° N., 1° N. and the focus rather below normal, or it was, say, 3·5° N., 1° W. in the Gulf of Guinea and depth of focus normal. Further evidence from the area, but more particularly the evidence of seismograms, will decide this. Many public buildings, banks, offices and native houses in the area have been damaged or destroyed, killing seventeen people at Accra, twenty-nine at Cape Coast and twenty at Sekondi, besides injuring several others. At Accra the electric lighting system was interrupted, but this was quickly remedied. An earthquake of these dimensions is an exceptionally rare occurrence, if not unknown, near Accra, and according to recent catalogues of epicentres there is no active epicentre anywhere near the present one. It is unfortunate that there are no seismographs situated nearer the probable epicentre than Algiers, Johannesberg, Cape Town and Nairobi, though the shock appears to have been sufficiently intense to have been registered at these, and by seismographs at even greater epicentral distances.
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Earthquake on the Gold Coast. Nature 144, 18 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144018a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144018a0