Earthquake Reported Off Long Island

[Pat McCotter]

Earthquake Reported Off Long Island
Felt As Far Away As Vermont

By RINKER BUCK, rbuck@courant.com
2:44 PM EST, November 30, 2010

A minor earthquake that was felt as far away as Vermont rocked an area underneath the Atlantic Ocean near Long Island on Tuesday morning.

The U.S. Geological Survey said that the quake, measuring 3.9 on the Richter Scale, was detected at 10:46 a.m. The epicenter was 117 miles southeast of Bridgeport and was probably felt most strongly on the south shore of Long Island.

By noon, the USGS had already received about 65 reports of the quake on its "Did You Feel It?" website (www: earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/dyfi). The vast majority of the calls were from Long Island and coastal Connecticut, but responders felt the quake and registered a response as far away as Burlington, Vt.

A USGS spokesman said that the agency has not received any reports of damage from the quake.

Seismologist Vernon Cormier, a professor of physics at the University of Connecticut, said that because of the relative stability of the east coast land mass, "quakes like this are very unusual, but we do have one perhaps once every 10 years or so."

Cormier said that the Atlantic seaboard is in the middle of a large plate that stretches west to California and east to the mid-Atlantic. Stresses developing thousands of miles away at the edge of the plate can activate movement that causes a minor temblor along the east coast.

Cormier also said that ocean water very efficiently carries the elastic waves of an earthquake beneath the surface, one reason the small quake might have been felt so far away.

[Tom Sawyer]

I told PatK no cannonballs in the ocean.   

[Pat K]

I told PatK no cannonballs in the ocean.   

Hey let a guy have some fun o-k.

[KBCraig]

Dammit Pat K, I told you to not fall off the cooler.