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The Newcastle, New South Wales, earthquake of 28 December 1989

Created 16/10/2025

Updated 16/10/2025

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An earthquake occurred without warning at 10:27 am on 28 December 1989 (local time) causing loss of life in the city of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, the first earthquake to cause fatalities in Australia since European settlement. The magnitude is estimated to have been 5.6 on the Richter scale. Earthquakes of this size occur on average about once every eighteen months in Australia. A single aftershock was recorded on a network of ten seismographs installed on 29 December in and around Newcastle; it had a magnitude of 2.1. The focal depth of the mainshock was 11.5±0.5 km and of the aftershock 13.5±0.8 km, which is beneath the Permian sediments of the Sydney Basin. The epicentres of both earthquakes are coincident within the error bounds and are some 15 km from the centre of damage in the City. The damage in Newcastle was made worse by an underlying thin layer of alluvium which magnified the ground motion substantially. A fault-plane solution indicates that the earthquake had a thrust mechanism with nodal planes striking in a NW-SE direction, parallel to the mapped surface faults in the region. Limited strong motion data were recorded, but not close to the epicentre.

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Additional Info

Field Value
Title The Newcastle, New South Wales, earthquake of 28 December 1989
Language eng
Licence Not Specified
Landing Page https://data.gov.au/data/en/dataset/18a3bb34-0f89-4691-af2a-2dad2c9314ab
Contact Point
Geoscience Australia Data
clientservices@ga.gov.au
Reference Period 20/04/2018
Geospatial Coverage Australia
Data Portal Geoscience Australia

Data Source

This dataset was originally found on Geoscience Australia "The Newcastle, New South Wales, earthquake of 28 December 1989". Please visit the source to access the original metadata of the dataset:
https://ecat.ga.gov.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/csw/dataset/the-newcastle-new-south-wales-earthquake-of-28-december-1989