Where were you at 7:43 Monday night, and did you feel the tremor or hear a rumble?
A small earthquake was reported in the Moncton area.
Earthquakes Canada Seismologist Allison Bent says the tremor measured 2.3 on the Richter scale, “It wasn’t big, but it was large enough that a few people close to the epicentre did feel it.”
She adds earthquakes in New Brunswick aren’t an everyday occurrence but the province does get them from time to time, but they’re not always in the same location.
“When they’re that size, it has to be close to a populated area for somebody to feel it. So some of them that might be in less populated areas in northern New Brunswick would go unnoticed by people, but our instruments would pick them up.”
The epicentre of Monday’s quake was around 15 kilometres north of Moncton, but Bent says it was much too small for things to fall off of shelves, “They would notice where there’s a light shaking, or sometimes there’s a sort of low noise. It might sound to some people like a truck hits a house or something like heavy traffic.”
Bent says in the early 80s, there was a series of a few earthquakes in the Miramichi area that were above magnitude five, but she adds that’s very rare, “The two, sometimes magnitude threes, those happen, and it’d be very unusual for them to be followed by anything larger.”
