A rare 3.6-magnitude earthquake struck metro Detroit.
The quake was felt 15.5 miles south of Detroit in Amherstburg, Ontario. According to reports, residents in Michigan said they felt the tremor, which hit late Thursday night, April 19.
It was felt at least 40 miles from Dearborn and Downriver, the paper reported.
“It was so weird & scary!” one person wrote on Twitter. “I heard a boom noise and then 3 seconds later I felt a tremor beneath my feet.”
“They’re relatively rare, but it’s not the first time there’s been an earthquake in the area,” said Ian Lee, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
The event was “the largest quake in Michigan since 1947 and the second-largest in records dating back roughly a century,” noted Larry Ruff, a University of Michigan professor and seismologist.
“Michigan is basically a big bathtub filled with sediments, which is the reason it has fewer earthquakes than surrounding regions,” Eric Hetland, a geophysicist and associate professor in the UM Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, said.
