On the night of Wednesday, January 8, a magnitude 1.8 earthquake was felt by many of those in the Tri-Town, especially Mattapoisett. No damage was reported following the incident.
According to the United States Geological Survey, a government agency under the Department of the Interior, the earthquake shook the ground a couple seconds after 9:11 pm. The USGS actually estimates the epicenter of the quake was just over the line in Acushnet (41.672°N, 70.869°W), though the closest center of population was Mattapoisett.
The quake luckily wasn’t powerful enough to do real damage but was still enough to rattle around some household objects and wake up those that were asleep. Even though it wasn’t too mighty, it was still clocked by many around the South Coast, with even some saying they felt tremors in Spencer, MA, about 70 miles away. The closest major station that monitors seismic activity in the area is the Adam Dziewonski Observatory in Harvard, MA.
A few hours before, there was a slightly more powerful magnitude 1.9 quake near East Haddam in central Connecticut, about 85 miles west of Mattapoisett.
Earthquakes of this nature hitting New England are rare but not all that unlikely. The last major earthquake recorded in Massachusetts was the Cape Ann Earthquake of November 18, 1755. It was a magnitude 5.8~ (measuring accurately wasn’t entirely possible yet) and there is still much speculation as to its origin, with some claiming it to be a ripple effect from another earthquake in Portugal.
We sit nowhere near a plate’s fault line; thus, the nature of these quakes is different from those of the Ring of Fire around the Pacific or the eastern Indian Ocean. Most likely, according to geologists, these minor New England quakes are caused either by the settling of the crust after the formation of the Appalachian Mountains or by “post-glacial rebound,” or the land still rising from the removal of the weight of Ice Age-era glaciers a few millennia ago.
By Sam Bishop