When a Green Party candidate for the Senate in New Jersey blamed climate change for the recent earthquake in the Northeast, social media went into a frenzy of mockery.
According to a report, Christina Amira Khalil wrote the post on social media shortly after last Friday’s earthquake and subsequent aftershocks.
Khalil said she felt her first earthquake and that it had never happened there. She then claimed there was an actual climate crisis.
Many people took to social media to express their opinions on Khalil’s remark; one user even said she skipped science class.
The congressional candidate removed the post shortly after it went up, but not before it received millions of views and a fact-checking X Community Note.
In response to Khalil’s tweet, in which she had connected Earth’s crustal movement to atmospheric climate change, dozens of other prominent politicians and intellectuals posted sartical messages.
Khalil, who is vying for the seat of Democrat Senator Robert Menendez, subsequently deleted her contentious post and replaced it with one in which she expresses her dismay at having felt the unusual earthquake in New Jersey.
According to reports, the 4.8-magnitude earthquake was felt from DC to New York City and all the way to Main and Pennsylvania. Authorities stated that there were around 18 aftershocks.
In New Jersey, a man filming outside captured footage of a huge fissure running across a road. He said that a crack wasn’t here before. He then proceeded to show a second crack close by.
The North American tectonic plate, which includes New Jersey, stretches from the East Coast to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the center of the Atlantic Ocean. Unlike the San Andreas Fault in California, which is on the border of the Pacific and North American plates, New Jersey is not situated on a plate boundary.
The Ramapo Fault is a fault system in the northeastern region of the US, spanning Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey.
