The Recorder – USGS detects minor earthquake in Wendell

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Published: 3/5/2022 8:34:04 PM

Modified: 3/5/2022 8:33:29 PM

WENDELL – Residents of eastern Franklin County may have felt their homes shake a litte Friday evening, and no, it wasn’t a truck driving through town. Rather, the region was hit with a detectable earthquake, which is an extremely rare occurrence.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) confirmed that a 2.4-magnitude earthquake occurred in Friday at approximately 5:50 pm, marking the first Franklin County earthquake detected by USGS seismographs earthquake since at least January 2010. It marks the first one in the Pioneer Valley since a 1.9-magnitude quake — which was likely not felt by anybody — was detected in Northampton in 2012, according to a USGS database.

Occurring approximately 3.5 kilometers below the surface, the earthquake most likely caused no damage and a few people in the area might have experienced slight shaking in their homes. A 2.4-magnitude earthquake is considered very minor and is “usually not felt, but can be recorded by seismograph,” according to Michigan Tech’s department of Geological and Mining Engineering and Sciences.

Very minor earthquakes happen usually once or twice a year in all of New England, according to USGS. Moderate earthquakes happen every few decades and the last one to cause a significant amount of damage was a 5.6-magnitude quake in cental New Hampshire in 1940.

The Wendell quake is the fourth in a series of minor quakes that have hit New England over the past month. A 2.9-magnitude quake — the strongest of the bunch — struck in Gorham, New Hampshire on Feb. 4. A 1.9-magnitude quake again hit Gorham on Feb. 16, and a 1.8-magnitude earthquake hit Contoocook, New Hampshire the following day. The two late-February quakes, however, were so minor that no human would ever detect them because anything under a 2.0 on the magnitude scale is so low that only a seismograph could detect it, according to the University of Washington.

In fact, the USGS has registered 30 earthquakes since January 2021 in New England, each one registering under 3.0 magnitude.

Earthquakes on the East Coast are much less frequent than on the West Coast and pinpointing their exact locations is also difficult. They occur at shallower depths, but the Appalachian Mountains and the makeup of tectonic plates beneath the Earth’s surface complicate the search as the region is “laced with known faults, but numerous smaller or deeply buried faults remain undetected,” which means scientists cannot determine which Faults are slipping and causing the quakes, according to the USGS.

A Saturday email to the Eastern US media representative of USGS was not returned by press time. Several Saturday afternoon phone calls to local geological departments at area universities were also not returned because the departments were closed for the weekend.

Anyone who felt the earthquake in Wendell Friday night can help contribute to citizen science by filling out a brief USGS survey here: https://on.doi.gov/35z0cSz.

Chris Larabee can be reached at [email protected] or 413-930-4081.

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