Did Monday’s Earthquake Rattle You?

A 3.8 magnitude earthquake in Maine was felt throughout much of coastal New England—including at Boston University. New England isn’t “an earthquake region, but we’re not absolutely silent either,” says BU researcher Rachel Abercrombie. Earthquake intensity map courtesy of US Geological Survey
Did Monday’s Earthquake Rattle You?
BU seismologist and research professor in Earth and environment Rachel Abercrombie on the Maine-centered, 3.8 tremor that shook Boston and New England
It wasn’t the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, thankfully, but some Boston University students and staff were rattled Monday by a 3.8 magnitude rumbler centered six miles off the southeast coast of York Harbor, Maine. The quake center was 26 miles from the Seabrook, N.H., nuclear power plant.
“I did not feel it, but many in our office did,” says Rene Fielding, BU’s emergency management director. Some Terriers who were startled by the rumbling at 10:22 am took to social media to report it, but most on campus appear to have taken it in stride.
“I have not received any calls,” Fielding says, “nor has BU Police—I checked with dispatch.”
The earthquake was felt at least as far west as central Massachusetts.
New England actually gets several small quakes in a typical year, according to the US Geological Survey. You have to go way back for the region’s record quakes: a 6.5 magnitude in 1638, centered either in New Hampshire or Vermont, and a 5.8 magnitude off Massachusetts’ Cape Ann in 1755. Older New Englanders lived through the most recent quake of import, a 1940 5.6 magnitude in New Hampshire that wrought moderate damage.
The Brink spoke to Rachel Abercrombie, a BU College of Arts & Sciences research professor in Earth and environment. She studies what starts and grows quakes and what controls their size and location. “I don’t like the ones that do damage,” she says. “I work a lot on very small earthquakes, because you can be excited about those without feeling that it’s causing anyone any misery.”
Q&A
With Rachel Abercrombie
The Brink: Did you feel the tremor?
Abercrombie: Yes, I did feel it. I was on the ground floor [at home]. So very, very light. My family, who were upstairs, definitely felt a stronger rattle. It really comes down to: what were you doing at the time? Also, things are always amplified as you go up. Imagine you’re sitting on the ground, it moves a little bit, but by the time the house is shaking, it’s moving more on the upper stories.
In the broader New England area, we’re not an earthquake region, but we’re not absolutely silent either.
The Brink: What causes these periodic shakings in our region? Are they different from the causes of massive quakes?
Abercrombie: You’ve got the plates of the Earth that we call the lithosphere. They’re about 100 kilometers thick all over the Earth. But the bit that breaks in an earthquake tends to be maybe the top 30 kilometers or so. Plates are rigid and solid. But they have plate boundaries. And those plate boundaries are where all the motion happens, as they move around on the stuff beneath, which is not molten, but it can flow a bit, like Silly Putty. We’re on the North American plate. It’s got one boundary in California, which is the San Andreas Fault, where the Earth is moving side to side. And then the other boundary nearest to us is in the middle of the Atlantic, where stuff is coming up in the middle from underneath, and it’s spreading out.
You have this big plate, which is moving at the edges, and it’s being pushed and squashed and pulled, and stresses build up in the middle. Something just has to adjust slightly.
The Brink: So, the cause of this quake is basically the same as that of the big ones we read about in California or around the world?
Abercrombie: It’s just plate tectonics, yes. But because we’re not on one of the main plate boundary regions, we’re just getting these little bits of force and stress that build up, and little adjustments.
The Pacific “Ring of Fire” is your main one. You have an ocean plate usually going down, you’re pushing things together, and there’s nowhere for stuff to go. One plate goes down underneath the other, and that’s when you get the biggest earthquakes, off Japan, Alaska, Chile, Sumatra, those regions.
The maximum amount of deaths and damage isn’t proportional to the size of the earthquake. It’s related to both the size of the earthquake and just how many people live close to it and what buildings they live in.
The Brink: Is there any reason to fear that a more serious quake—either in magnitude or impacting something like the Seabrook nuclear plant—could hit this part of the country some day?
Abercrombie: Well, this is why we have national seismic hazard maps and building codes, and why they’re rather stronger if you’re building a nuclear power station than if you’re building a small house. It really is all probability and risk and vulnerability. Yes, we are going to keep having a magnitude 4 or 5 earthquake every decade or two in the New England area; when power stations are built, they do take that into account. It’s certainly something that is being very carefully thought about and addressed. There was a big redoing in 2023 of the national seismic hazard maps. They’re estimating that in our part of the world, there’s something like a 5 to 25 percent chance of a slight, damaging earthquake shaking in 100 years. So it’s real, but it may well never happen in our lifetimes.
The Brink: Do the effects of climate change on the oceans have anything to do with the frequency or magnitude of quakes?
Abercrombie: The main thing related to climate change and earthquakes would probably be the weight of the water on the ground. Earthquakes are things breaking under pressure and stress. You get earthquakes caused by reservoirs, but usually quite small. And one of the reasons we think that’s happening is just that you’re putting a weight on the faults underneath. And sometimes they give. So maybe if you put an extra meter or two of sea ocean [from ice cap melts] and cover larger areas, you change the stresses.
The other thing that’s interesting is the way earthquakes are felt on the east and west coasts [of America]—partly because they happen every 10 years [here] instead of every year or two [there], so we all get more worried and excited about them. But the other thing is, the rocks in the eastern half of the country are much older, so they’re just much more solid. Whereas the West Coast, because it’s on a plate boundary, it’s had a lot more activity. They haven’t had millions upon millions of years to sit there and heal. They’re actually moving and active, and things are all being shaken and broken up on a more regular basis.
The Brink: What’s the largest magnitude quake you’ve studied?
Abercrombie: The largest I’ve ever worked on was about magnitude eight. Some of these were just off Sumatra and in the Indian Ocean.
The Brink: Were you on the ground there?
Abercrombie: One of the reasons you can be a seismologist in Boston is because there are thousands of seismometers around the world, sending data in real time anywhere.
We cannot predict earthquakes. If we could, where do you think all the seismologists would be just before it happened, with their instruments, [getting] recordings that they are desperate for?
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
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