The largest earthquake to hit Melbourne, Australia, in over a century, shook the city on Sunday, swaying buildings but ultimately doing very little damage.
According to government organization Geoscience Australia, preliminary data showed that the 3.8-magnitude earthquake struck the northwest suburb of Sunbury at a depth of 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) at 11:41 pm local time.
The earthquake was the biggest within 40 kilometers of Melbourne since a magnitude 4.5 quake struck in 1902, according to Adam Pascale, chief scientist at the Seismology Research Centre in Victoria.
“It woke me up! Probably 5-10 seconds of minor shaking. The adrenaline hasn’t dissipated yet…” Pascale said on Twitter.
More than 21,000 reports of the earthquake, which was felt as far away as Bendigo, a city 150 kilometers north of Melbourne, and as far south as Hobart on the island of Tasmania, were received by Geoscience Australia.
A Melbourne resident tweeted, referring to a downtown skyscraper, “I’m on the 70th floor in the Eureka Tower and the entire building swayed a couple of meters”.
Another person claimed they “ran out of the house with a machete” while still wearing their pajamas.
Although the emergency services issued a warning about possible aftershocks in a statement on Facebook, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology stated on Twitter that there was no tsunami threat from the earthquake.
Australia does experience seismic activity as a result of tectonic plate movement, but earthquakes are not as frequent there.
The Pacific Ring of Fire, home to the most active volcanoes on earth and where tectonic plates press against one another, is where the majority of earthquakes take place.
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake struck Victoria in 2021, nearly 200 kilometers from Melbourne, but it still caused some minor structural damage there.
Source-CNN
