Midstate reacts to New Jersey earthquake

LANCASTER, Pa. (WHTM) – A 4.8 magnitude earthquake happened this morning in Lebanon, New Jersey. It also rattled the Midstate.

“I thought it was an explosion,” Lindsay Gumby said. She was visiting Lancaster’s Central Market but lives in Berks County.

Gumby says she felt her entire house shake for about a minute.

“The vibration I thought was just construction going on in my neighborhood,” Jeremiah Wright, a Lancaster City resident, said. “I thought sidewalks and things were just being repaired.”

“I knew the minute I felt it,” Franklin and Marshall College’s geoscience professor Timothy Bechtel said.

Bechtel says this tremor is not abnormal.

“Every two or three years we’re going to get one of those,” he said. “This was a reasonably common thing, a small earthquake that was felt widely but really didn’t do any damage anywhere.”

Michael Meyer is an assistant professor for Earth system science at Harrisburg University. He says depending on where you were at the time of the quake, you may or may not have felt it because of the type of rock under your feet.

“Like the Great Valley, so through just south of the mountain ridge, down to like Carlisle, that’s all Martinsburg Shale,” Meyer said. “[It] is very busted up and broken up. That absorbs the seismic waves much more readily.”

That means you wouldn’t feel it as much compared to areas with harder rock.

“Down through maybe parts of York, Lancaster, a little more east, that has a bit more of rigid rocks,” Meyer said. “Those rocks can transmit those waves far more readily.”

There were four aftershocks as of 2:15 pm. Those have a much lesser magnitude than the original earthquake.

“It’s definitely surprising to feel an earthquake from a different state,” Wright said.

“This was just a fun, geophysical oddity,” Bechtel said.

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