People near Milledgeville may have felt a rumble in their sleep as a minor earthquake shook the area early Sunday morning.
The shallow, 2.3-magnitude quake struck around 3:30 a.m. about 20 minutes north of Milledgeville in Hancock County near Lake Sinclair, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The agency had not received any reports of people having felt the temblor.
While Georgia is not typically thought of as a hotbed for quakes, the ground does shake with regularity.
The most recent seismic activity was recorded two months ago, when a 2.5-magnitude quake hit near lake Jackson in Newton County on Sept. 12 and another — a 2.1-magnitude — the following day near Reed Creek in Hart County, not far from the South Carolina border, according to data from the USGS.
In June, a 3.9-magnitude quake hit near Metter, just a few points under the largest ever recorded: A 4.1-magnitude that took place in 1916 about 30 miles south of Atlanta.
More than three dozen earthquakes of magnitude 2.5 or greater have occurred in Georgia since 1974, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of data from the U.S. Geological Survey. The state sits atop three seismic zones that encompass most of the state, according to the Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency. The most active region, however, is Northwest Georgia, which sits in the Eastern Tennessee Seismic zone.
The zone follows the western Appalachian Mountains from West Virginia down 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.
Four years ago, in 2018, a 4.4-magnitude tremblor struck the area near the Watts Bar Nuclear plant in east Tennessee. The plant is near Chattanooga and about 160 miles north of Atlanta, though many metro Atlantans felt the shaking. No damage was detected at the nuclear plant.
The most significant seismic event to strike the broader region happened in Charleston in 1886. It claimed at least 60 deaths, and thousands of buildings were leveled, including the city’s beloved Emanuel AME Church. The powerful quake was estimated to have been a high-6 magnitude event and captivated Atlanta. Residents crowded into the offices of The Atlanta Constitution to hear the latest news.
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