A minor earthquake near Detroit beach shook the spaces downriver and felt in the area, but left the Fermi 2 nuclear power plant nearby in a state, authorities said.
The 3. 2-degree sismo recorded Friday night southeast of Detroit Beach near Monroe through the U. S. Geological Survey, about two miles south of the nuclear power plant.
The earthquake, rare in Michigan, occurred at 6:55 p. m. off the coast of Sterling State Park, according to the USGS.
We decided that the intensity was 9. 2 km, or approximately 5. 71 miles. The USGS first reported that the earthquake reached a magnitude of 3. 4.
A magnitude 3. 2 earthquake is considered minor and causes no damage, said Dongdong Yao, a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the University of Michigan who has studied seismic activity in the region.
Residents downstream and those as far away as Bowling Green, Ohio reported feeling the earthquake. The intensity spread downstream, adding Trenton, La Salle, Grosse Ile, south in northern Ohio, as far north as Waterford Township and Macomb County. .
Geological firm officials may just not be contacted for remark Friday night.
The tremors appeared to have affected Monroe County’s Fermi 2 nuclear power plant, operated through DTE Energy Co.
“We stay in a solid condition and are 100 percent energy,” spokesman Stephen Tait said Friday night.
The plant operated 100 percent on Friday after completing a pre-this-month refueling operation that lasted during the coronavirus pandemic, according to reports from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which had not issued an occasion notification report for Saturday’s morning earthquake.
Yao said that even a minor earthquake can cause a sense of movement in some other people, but not in others. “Some other people may be very sensitive, so they may feel a very slight tremor,” he said.
Yao said the earthquake is unusual: “If you look 20 years ago, this type of earthquake is very rare in this region.
Friday’s earthquake came more than a year after the company recorded a magnitude 4. 0 earthquake on Lake Erie, just off the coast of northeast Ohio, in June 2019, considered an “intraplate” earthquake, USGS officials said on the hour.
In April 2018, a magnitude 3. 6 earthquake occurred near Amherstburg, Ontario, across the Detroit River, about 25 km south of Detroit, and I felt at least 40 miles away in parts of Downriver and Dearborn.
Another earthquake, recorded in 4. 0, struck south of Galesburg, near Kalamazoo on 2 May 2015, authorities said. Also in 2015, downtown Michigan experienced a smaller earthquake with a magnitude of 3. 3 on the Richter scale in a seven-mile domain of Union City, thirteen miles from Battle Creek, 14 miles from Coldwater and 47 miles from Lansing.
On January 16, 2018, a meteor hit Earth by a magnitude 2. 0 earthquake in the Detroit metropolitan area.
Earthquakes “are not common” in the area, said Kyle Klein, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service. “We’re nowhere near any active failures. “
According to the USGS, the North American maximum east of the Rocky Mountains has rare earthquakes.
“. . . Most of the huge region of the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic can go years as a giant enough earthquake to feel, and several U. S. states have never reported a damaging earthquake,” the firm said.
The USGS online page states that peak earthquakes in North America east of the Rocky Mountains “occur as faults in the rocky bed, miles deep. “
“However, few earthquakes east of the Rocky Mountains have been definitively related to mapped geological faults, unlike the scenario in plate barriers such as the San Andrés Fault System in California, where scientists can use geological evidence to identify a fault that has caused a giant earthquake failure and is likely to produce long-lasting giant earthquakes.