London at risk of earthquake after two faultlines are found beneath the city

London has two small fault lines running beneath it which could cause an earthquake.

A geologist from Imperial College London discovered two faults that are large enough to cause a small magnitude 5 earthquake.

This could happen once every thousand years, said Dr Richard Ghail, a specialist in civil and environmental engineering at Imperial College. The risk of a quake is ‘enough to be scary but not fundamentally a problem’, he said, according to The Telegraph.  The faults move between 1mm and 2mm a year. One was found beneath central London and another underneath Canary Wharf.

 

However, the research showed that our previous view of London as an unshakable place of geological stability was incorrect. ‘It now looks a modestly active, very heavily faulted, complicated area,’ he added. ‘It’s probably gone from the simplest to most complex geology in the UK.’ London was hit by an earthquake was back in the 1770s