The farming community of El Centro in Imperial County had a rude awakening in the middle of the night: the force of a magnitude 4.8 earthquake and a long series of aftershocks.
The earthquake struck about 12:36 a.m. Tuesday 2 miles northwest of El Centro, in an area just off the Salton Sea that has active faults, said U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Elizabeth Cochran.
The earthquake was followed by a magnitude 4.5 aftershock. In the following 12 hours, more than 180 minor aftershocks were recorded.
If the shaking wasn't enough, some residents woke up to the alarm their phone received from the ShakeAlert app, which initially estimated that the tremor was stronger than it turned out to be. “It's pretty terrible to be woken up in the middle of the night with a loud alert telling you to take [cover] (in several languages) for something we don't even feel”, @MattInformed said on X.com (formerly known as Twitter).
However, this type of seismic tumult is not uncommon in this region.
“In this particular area where [the earth’s] “The crust itself is warmer than average, we have these pretty active sequences where we see a ton of aftershocks,” Cochran said. When a sequence of earthquakes occurs, he said, most aftershocks are at least a unit of magnitude smaller than the first quake.
Residents near the epicenter would have felt moderate shaking that “can be quite scary for people who are nearby,” Cochran said.
However, little to no damage is expected from that level of shaking. No damage or injuries were reported in the hours after the earthquakes began.
During the last sequence of earthquakes in the area, in 2021, the main impact was a magnitude 5 tremor, Cochran said.
