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A third earthquake in two weeks has hit a Bedfordshire town, the British Geological Survey said.
Residents of Leighton Buzzard described a short, sharp jolt Tuesday that geologists said would likely be an aftershock from the first earthquake felt in the area on Sept. 8.
“Obviously, some stress has been building up in that particular area and we’ve had the initial earthquake,” said Glenn Ford, a seismologist with the British Geological Survey (BGS). “Maybe it’s still rebalancing the stress regime in that particular part of the world and we’re having these little aftershocks too.”
The earthquake of September 8 was of magnitude 3.5 and the first aftershock five days later measured 2.1. The last aftershock was magnitude 3.
According to the BGS, neighbors said the shaking “only lasted a couple of seconds” and that “they felt a single shake, a bit like being in a car that has made an emergency stop.”
The deepest earthquake to hit the UK in three decades was at Market Rasen in Lincolnshire in 2008. One person was injured, but damage from the 5.2 magnitude quake was slight, with reports of one collapsed chimney and a cross falling from the church.
However, the effects of the 2008 earthquake were felt as far away as Wales, Scotland and London, and England’s emergency services received more than 1,000 calls from people who woke up to find their homes shaking.
On Tuesday, Ford said: “What we are seeing here is a small replica of that [initial] earthquake. “He added that it was ‘typical behavior’ that had been seen in different parts of the UK ‘on many occasions’.
Ford said: “It will probably calm down soon, but could we get another one? We certainly could, but we don’t know when it might happen. “
Dr. Richard Luckett, a BGS seismologist, added: “The ground below us is constantly under stress, it has been during geological time, and also under stress due to plate boundaries in the mid-Atlantic.
“You can measure the whole of the UK moving east with GPS. There is a certain level of stress permanently and every now and then due to natural build-up a fault breaks and we have a small earthquake. We receive around two magnitudes 3 per year. “
