According to USGS, a mild earthquake struck in the waters well off the U.S. East Coast today; the magnitude 4.5 earthquake struck at 12:07 pm today at a depth of 10 km. The quake was too far off-shore to create any damage and the earthquake wasn’t strong enough to generate any tsunami threat for the East Coast.
The epicenter of the earthquake struck in an unusual area. Located roughly 600 miles southeast of New York City, 600 miles northeast of Jacksonville, Florida, and 500 miles east of Charleston, South Carolina, the earthquake struck in an area known as the Hatteras Plain, a flat area of the ocean located halfway between the U.S. East Coast and Bermuda. There have been no earthquakes of any magnitude in this area in the last 30 days and the area is located in the middle of the North American Basin, far from the Mid Atlantic Ridge that splits the Atlantic Ocean to the east that tends to see regular seismic activity.
People along the U.S. East Coast did use the USGS “Did you feel it?” reporting tool on their website to report feeling something at the time of the earthquake. Reports came in from Wilmington, North Carolina, Norfolk, Virginia, Georgetown, South Carolina, Centreville, Maryland, Charleston and Cheraw, South Carolina, Irvington, New York, Thompson, Connecticut, and Delray Beach, Florida. USGS merely reports on those “Did you feel it?” responses and does not verify the information received from those sites.
There are also no reports of military activity in the area. In the summer of 2021, the U.S. Navy blasted its newest aircraft carrier with thousands of pounds of explosives just off the U.S. East Coast; as part of a hardening exercise, that blast had registered as a magnitude 3.9 event by sensors at USGS. USGS confirmed this was a seismic event and did not reference any explosion or military event in their report.
