New York City and the broader East Coast were shaken by a magnitude 3.0 earthquake late on August 2, reminding locals of a significantly larger quake that startled the region in April 2024.
The new earthquake, which occurred at 10:18 P.M. EDT, 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. Neither New York City nor Bergen County, New Jersey, 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,” said Benjamin Fernando, a seismologist at Johns Hopkins University, in an interview with Scientific American in 2024.
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READ MORE: How Likely Is a Major Earthquake in New York City—And Is the City Prepared for It?
But 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 that were a stunning 630,000 times larger in amplitude than the August 2 New Jersey quake.)
Amanda Montañez
In turn, the August 2 event created seismic waves with about three times the amplitude of a magnitude 2.5 event, which represents the high end of typical activity in the region.
The August 2 earthquake occurred nearly 40 miles away from the 2024 earthquake. That is too far away for the new event to be considered an aftershock of the previous one, 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, which occurred hundreds of millions of years ago.
Although the East Coast is not prone to large earthquakes like the West Coast is, 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 the USGS.
