A 5.0-magnitude earthquake in a remote area of eastern Canada shook Manhattan offices and apartment towers and rattled people in Staten Island and New Jersey.
No injuries or damage were reported in the city from the quake, which struck about 400 miles north of New York and was rare for this part of North America, a Columbia University scientist said.
“It’s big for the northeastern US — one of the largest ones in the last 20 or 30 years,” said Won-Young Kim, a researcher at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Rockland County.
Dozens of New Yorkers who called 911 or reported feeling the quake on the US Geological Survey’s Web site felt “mild shaking” that registered at about 1 or 2 on the Modified Mercalli intensity scale, which measures peoples’ quake experiences, Kim said.
Level 1 or 2 on the 12-step Mercalli scale includes quakes that are felt only by instruments, or by people on the upper stories of buildings. Level 12 Mercalli quakes are cataclysmic, and might be strong enough to change the course of a river.
The Mercalli scale differs from the better-known Richter scale, which is a more scientific measure of quake strength.
Had yesterday’s 5.0 Richter-scale quake had its epicenter in New York, “it would have been very intense,” said Kim — and could have damaged poorly-constructed buildings.
Little damage was reported from the quake even in Ottawa, the nearest big city to its epicenter. Several buildings in Ottawa and Toronto were evacuated, including Ottawa’s Parliament building.
“About once a decade, you get an earthquake in eastern Canada that is felt like this,” said John Filson, a retired US Geological Survey scientist.
Filson wasn’t surprised it the quake was felt in New York and in the rest of the US, in a swath stretching from Maine to Michigan. “Earthquakes in the eastern US tend to be felt over wider areas,” he said. “That’s why you get this dramatic response from the public.”