Did you feel a rumble in the middle of the night? Yep, that was a small earthquake.
A 3.4-magnitude earthquake shook parts of Upstate New York, including the Syracuse area, around 11:45 p.m. ET Friday (3:45 a.m. UTC), according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The quake was centered in Lake Ontario, about 9 miles outside of Henderson in Jefferson County and 50 miles north of Syracuse.
According to the USGS, the earthquake was felt in parts of Canada, Central New York and Northern New York, with reports from Syracuse, Oswego, Fulton, Watertown, Fort Drum, Rochester and the Utica/Rome area. Some said they even felt tremors near Buffalo and Albany, as far as 140 miles from the epicenter.
No damage or injuries have been reported.
The USGS says earthquakes of 3 or 4 on the Richter scale are considered small and unlikely to have a significant impact. The Richter scale measures the amount of energy released in an earthquake, which happens when tectonic plates below ground abruptly slip past each other.
The Richter scale ranges from 1 to 10. That scale is logarithmic, so every step is 10 times more powerful than the last. For example, an earthquake measuring 6 on the scale is 10 times more powerful than one measuring 5.
In April, a 4.8-magnitude earthquake in New Jersey rattled much of the northeast, including Upstate New York, but caused little damage. Large quakes are uncommon in the region, but the geology of the northeast reportedly makes it more likely that they’ll be felt over a wider area than a similar magnitude along fault lines in the western U.S.
“The rocks in the eastern U.S. that those seismic waves move through, there’s just a lot more coherence,” William Barnhart, a geophysicist and assistant coordinator for the Earthquake Hazards Program at the U.S. Geological Survey, told U.S. News & World Report. “That energy can move much more efficiently.”
If you felt Friday night’s earthquake, you can report it on the USGS website.