By adamg - 1/27/25 - 10:39 am

Reports coming in from all over (Roslindale, Jamaica Plain, the rest of the Boston area and southern New Hampshire) of some shaking around 10:25 a.m. Read more.

Seismic chart showing impact of earthquake in New England
By adamg - 4/5/24 - 10:39 am

The US Geological Survey reported a magnitude 4.8 earthquake in Lebanon, NJ at 10:23 a.m. and not long after, people across the Boston area began reporting a bit of shaking. Read more.

Earthquake seismograph
By adamg - 11/8/20 - 9:27 am

Reports coming in of tremors all across the Boston area due to a 3.6 quake in Buzzards Bay just off New Bedford. Read more.

By adamg - 5/17/13 - 11:20 am

At 9:50 a.m., CarCarli tweeted from her North End apartment:

Earthquake seismograph
By adamg - 10/16/12 - 7:27 pm

You feel it? Area tweeters, of course, were all over it:

By adamg - 9/16/12 - 11:01 am

A 2.5-magnitude quake struck about 41 miles east of Rockport around 10:30 p.m. yesterday.

Leaning tower
By adamg - 8/23/11 - 11:58 pm

Greg MacKay braved aftershocks to take this photo of 111 Devonshire St., the building that alarmed citizens reported was leaning and to which firefighters rushed - only to

Weston Observatory quake graph
By adamg - 8/23/11 - 2:18 pm

Yep! Earthquake centered in Virginia around 1:50 p.m., but tremors reached here.

12 Channel St. was evacuated. Several downtown buildings were either completely or partially evacuated, including 257 Summer St., where Louis Cameron reports:

Crazy, our whole building swayed. Still feel sick.

Globes at the Leventhal Map Center at the BPL main branch in Copley Square turned into bobbleheads. Logan Airport reported diversions from other East Coast airports shut because of the quake.

Sean Roche reports the quake wasn't quite strong enough to dislodge a bag of M&Ms from a Cambridge vending machine.

Riptor exclaimed:

My etch-a-sketch gallery! It's RUINED!

John Strauss wondered:

Any truth to the rumor that the tower at the Prince Restaurant on Rt. 1 is now standing straight up?

By adamg - 6/23/10 - 3:04 pm

An earthquake in Quebec near the Ontario line sent tremors through the Boston area shortly before 2 p.m. A residential building at 1180 Beacon Street in Brookline was evacuated after it began shaking, possibly because of the quake, Neal Simpson at Brookline Patch reports.

Louis Cameron tweets he felt it at 253 Summer St. on Fort Point Channel. At 1:53, he exclaimed:

By fibrowitch - 4/17/10 - 7:36 pm

Listening to All things considered on NPR and they are interviewing a woman who developed a computer program, that uses the motion sensor in lap top computers to measure earth quakes.  Most newer laptops have an accelerometer, a kind of motion sensor that detects when a computer gets dropped or shaken.  If the computer gets dropped, it shuts off the hard drive to save the laptop.  Gosh, wish I had one of those three years ago when Purrball knocked the laptop off the kitchen table. 

Your laptop could detect the next earthquake  I love this quote from Elizabeth Cochran - almost as much as I love the her last name is Cochran - wonder if she is going to have a distant relative named Zefram  Okay, anyway, here is the quote --

"As soon as I knew there were these low-cost sensors inside these accelerometers, I thought it would be perfect to use them to network together and actually record earthquakes," geoscientist Elizabeth Cochran of the University of California at Riverside says.

By adamg - 10/19/07 - 9:33 am

The US Geological Survey reports a magnitude-2.5 earthquake at 1:25 a.m., centered one mile west of Littleton Common.

By adamg - 11/18/05 - 8:44 am

Little known fun fact: There are four areas in the U.S. considered to be at risk for potentially devastating earthquakes: the Pacific coast, southern Illinois and Missouri, Charleston, S.C. and Boston.

The main reason we should stop making fun of people who move to California is the Cape Ann Earthquake of 1755, which, Michael informs us, happened 250 years ago today:

In Boston, hundreds of walls and chimneys collapsed and fell to the ground. John Adams, one of many people who reported on the quake, noted that the tremors lasted for about four minutes. In Pembroke and Scituate chasms opened in the earth and sand reached the surface. Sailors on the sea felt as if the ships were striking land. The earthquake was felt from Lake George, New York to 200 miles east of the cape and from Chesapeake Bay to Montreal and Nova Scotia. ...

It also knocked the grasshopper off Faneuil Hall and, as Michael adds, was blamed on Benjamin Franklin, because God was expressing his ire at Franklin's attempt to stop divine lightning from smoting sinners with his newfangled lightning rods. Modern scientists estimate it between 6.0 and 6.3 on the Richter scale.

Also see: