New York City and the broader East Coast were shaken by a 3.0-magnitude earthquake late on August 2, reminding locals of a significantly larger quake that startled the region in April 2024.
The earthquake, which occurred at 10:18 P.M. local time, was centered near Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., about 10 miles from downtown Manhattan, at a depth of about six miles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Neither New York City nor Bergen County, N.J., where Hasbrouck Heights is located, reported major damage or injuries, according to the New York Times.
Earthquakes large enough to be felt are uncommon in the eastern U.S. “It’s a pretty quiet part of the country,” Benjamin Fernando, a seismologist at Johns Hopkins University, told Scientific American in 2024.
[Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter]
READ MORE: How Likely Is a Major Earthquake in New York City—And Is the City Prepared for It?
However, small earthquakes, with magnitudes of 2.5 or lower, are quite common in the region. The earthquake magnitude scale is logarithmic, with each whole-number increase in magnitude representing a 10-fold increase in the size of the seismic waves it produces. That means the 2024 earthquake was 63 times bigger than the August 2 event. (The massive earthquake that rattled Russia just days ago, a magnitude 8.8 event, produced seismic waves a stunning 630,000 times larger in amplitude than the August 2 New Jersey quake.)
In turn, the August 2 event created seismic waves with about three times the amplitude of a 2.5 magnitude event that represents the high end of typical activity in the region.
The August 2 earthquake occurred nearly 40 miles away from the 2024 earthquake, which is too far away for it to be considered an aftershock of the previous event, although the 2024 quake does continue to spur aftershocks, according to the USGS.
The USGS attributed the August 2 earthquake to “faulting at shallow depths in the crust” and noted that it did not occur near a plate boundary. The region has many faults, but these fractures in Earth’s crust are very old—they date to the era when the Appalachian and Blue Ridge Mountains were built, hundreds of millions of years ago.
Although the East Coast is not prone to large earthquakes like the West Coast, the rattling of an East Coast quake is felt more broadly because the hard bedrock of the region transfers seismic energy more efficiently than the heavily faulted West Coast bedrock.
If you felt the quake, share your observations with USGS.
