Those in northwest Georgia might have felt a slight shake Saturday morning due to a minor earthquake.
The shallow 2.2-magnitude quake struck around 6 a.m. about 2 miles from Eton in Murray County, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The agency has not received any reports of people having felt the tremor. The small town is about a dozen miles from the Tennessee border and about 90 miles north of Atlanta.
Most recently, a 2.3-magnitude earthquake occurred Nov. 18 shortly before 2 a.m. about 16 miles from Macon in Bibb County, the agency reported. Another 2.3-magnitude quake struck 20 minutes north of Milledgeville in Hancock County near Lake Sinclair on Oct. 30 at about 3:30 a.m., according to the USGS.
More than three dozen earthquakes of magnitude 2.5 or greater have occurred in Georgia since 1974. The largest recorded in the state was a 4.1-magnitude quake about 30 miles from Atlanta in 1916.
Georgia has a number of fault lines where most earthquakes occur. The Brevard Fault Line, the best-known one, runs from Blue Ridge to Marietta. The Soque River Fault follows the Sogue River in the northeast and Salacoa Creek is in northwest Cherokee County.
The most active region is northwest Georgia, which sits in the Eastern Tennessee Seismic zone. The zone follows the western Appalachian Mountains from West Virginia south to the Alabama-Mississippi border, and it experiences about one magnitude 4.0 earthquake every five to 10 years, according to GEMA. At that level, the shaking could rattle small objects off shelves and cause cracks in plaster.
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