“It is too early to talk about the possibility of any future seismic activity in the Arabian Peninsula,” said Khaled Abdulaziz Al-Eissa of King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST).
“The Saudi Arabian Digital Seismic Network (SANDSN), operated by the Saudi Geological Survey (SGS), is quite capable of monitoring any seismic activity,” he added.
The network helps to improve seismic hazard parameters using earthquake location and magnitude calibration of high quality data. SANDSN consists of more than 38 seismic stations. All countries, including the Kingdom, rely on “early warnings about natural calamities as per international conventions,” he added.
These warnings quickly reach those at risk and can substantially reduce the loss of life and damage to property, he said when asked about the possibility of any natural calamity and the risk component in the region.
Al-Eissa said that early warnings are properly monitored by the Kingdom's institutions. Asked how prone the Kingdom is to earthquakes, he recalled the earthquake that hit the Madinah area a few years back.
In an observation period of 2009, more than 30,000 earthquakes caused by a failed volcano eruption struck an area of northwest Saudi Arabia that was considered seismically inactive, said a recently published report.
One quake, measuring 5.7 on the Richter scale, led to the evacuation of 40,000 people from the town of Al-Ays near Madinah at that time. A swarm of thousands of earthquakes that struck Saudi Arabia in 2009 shed light on the area that is volcanically active.
“The western regions of Saudi Arabia may be at risk from an unusual type of earthquake caused by failed volcanic eruptions,” said the report, quoting a team of Saudi and US scientists.
Although most of the lava fields — areas where lava from volcanoes flows — that caused Saudi Arabia's recent earthquakes are in uninhabited areas, the city of Madinah is spreading into one such area, and other cities, such as Nairobi, are close to similar regions.
Referring to the changes in the Kingdom’s climate, Mansour Almazroui, chief of the Meteorology Department and director of the Center of Excellence for Climate Change Research at King Abdulaziz University (KAU), said that "some central and northeastern parts of the Kingdom have been in the grip of late winter/spring rains for a few days.”
“Some more rain is expected over the northern parts of the Eastern Province on Sunday … While dry weather is expected in most parts of the Kingdom on Monday, further rains with isolated showers over the southwestern regions of the Kingdom, including the southern coastal areas of Makkah and Jazan, are expected Tuesday to Thursday this week,” he said.
He added that rainfall is likely to move toward the central and eastern parts of the Kingdom on Friday.
Almazroui fsaid that the reason behind the current unusual weather pattern over the Kingdom is caused by the prevailing La Niña phenomenon that disrupted the global weather cycle during the winter. The Kingdom is not directly affected by the prevailing La Niña conditions, but some indirect impacts of La Niña have clearly been observed, he said.
