East Texas earthquake detected Thursday
HARRISON COUNTY, Texas — Instruments detected a minor earthquake early Thursday morning in East Texas near the Louisiana border.
The magnitude-2.5 quake occurred at 12:13 a.m. about 5.5 miles south-southeast of Uncertain, Texas, south of Caddo Lake, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Unconfirmed reports to the USGS website indicate people felt it as far away as Shreveport, Louisiana, about 21 miles to the southeast.
USGS categorized the earthquake’s intensity as weak. A 2.5 magnitude quake releases about as much energy as a moderate lightning bolt, according to the Incorporated Research
Institutions for Seismology, a university consortium.
“It was pretty small,” said Alexandros Savvaidis, manager of the TexNet seismic monitoring system.
TexNet is a statewide network operated and managed by the Bureau of Economic Geology, a research unit at The University of Texas at Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences.
The seismograph that recorded the earthquake is near Carthage, Texas, in Panola County, Savvaidis said.
The quake is no cause for alarm, he said, but if others follow in the next few weeks, TexNet will install more instruments in the area to monitor the situation.
No earthquakes have been recorded previously in Harrison County, according to an online search tool developed by the UT Institute for Geophysics and the Texas Division of Emergency Management.
Earthquakes of similar size are common. About 1 million magnitude-2 and about 100,000 magnitude-3 earthquakes are recorded each year worldwide, according to IRIS. Quakes so small must be near a seismograph to be detected, however, so many happen unnoticed.
The largest earthquake recorded in Northeast Texas occurred in 1957 in Gladewater, with a magnitude of 4.7.