A moderate earthquake reported four miles offshore from Portsmouth was strong enough to rattle Concord and much of eastern New England on Monday morning and was felt as far away as Pennsylvania.

The quake, registering 3.8 on the Richter scale, took place at 10:22 a.m. about four miles east of the New Hampshire-Maine border at Portsmouth, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It appears to have done little or no damage. 

The closest land to the epicenter was the Isles of Shoals. 

“At first I thought an airplane had hit the house, there was a loud roar and a giant thump and the house shook alarmingly for only a moment. The geese took frantic flight,” wrote the caretaker of the Star Island Hotel, Alexandra de Steiguer, in a Facebook post. “All is fine out here. I did a big check of the island, no apparent changes.” 

New England is fairly quiet for earthquakes compared to some other parts of the United States but two or three measurable quakes are felt each year, both onshore and offshore. 

An earthquake of close to 4.0 or slightly higher in magnitude in the Northeast states “is not particularly common, but it’s not all that rare, either,” said Maureen Long, the chair of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Yale University.

The Maine Emergency Management Agency asked residents to only call 911 in the event of an emergency. The earthquake did not appear to cause major damage, said Vanessa Corson, a spokesperson for the agency. Corson also said local emergency management agencies did not report any damage.

New Hampshire’s Department of Safety said the state's 911 number did not receive any calls about damage or injuries.

The most recent New Hampshire earthquake of any serious magnitude happened in 1940, when two 5.8 magnitude earthquakes struck Tamworth, causing the most damage in the state’s history. There has never been a reported fatality from an earthquake in New Hampshire.

Due to underlying geology, earthquakes in the eastern half of the country are felt over a larger distance than earthquakes in the Rocky Mountains or West Coast.

A 1755 earthquake on Cape Ann in Massachusetts, estimated to have been magnitude 5.9, toppled over 1,000 chimneys in Boston. A repeat of that earthquake could cause billions of dollars in damage today.

 

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.