Plymouth had an earthquake the other day. It was a minor one, unworthy of action movie heroics. No one was hurt. There are no reports of damage.
Some people felt it, others didn't. One lady in a Plymouth-themed Facebook group said that her house shook, and I also saw a few "Did anyone else just feel that?" posts right around the time the earthquake went down.
I was napping in Buzzards Bay for it, and noticed not a thing. My sleeping through an earthquake would not surprise any of my exes, at least one of whom described yesterday's events to the letter 15 years ago.
"Earthquakes" are not something one would free-associate with "Massachusetts," but we do get them from time to time. The picture at the beginning of the article shows a geological map of Massachusetts. Those different colors are different sorts of rock.
The old "Where does Cape Cod end" argument, if solved geologically, runs it from Wareham to Duxbury Beach.
These rocks once formed a supercontinent named Laurentia. The Berkshires were the outer edge of it. Continental drift rearranged everything, and is still doing so. That process pushes rocks against each other, and that is how earthquakes happen. Keep in mind, I got into journalism as a sportswriter.
Earthquakes happen along fault lines. The picture above shows fault lines in New England. None of our faults are famous like the San Andreas fault.
Plymouth's quake didn't occur on one of these fault lines, although it did occur on the border of the Cape Cod part of the map at the beginning of the article.
Massachusetts has had hundreds of quakes just since 1975, as you can see in that awful screencap at the bottom of the article.
Most were minor, but some were serious. A 1755 quake off Cape Ann shook down chimneys all over New England. She was a 6.2 on the Richter Scale. The 1700s were an active time for earthquakes.
Southeastern Massachusetts has had minor but noticeable earthquakes in 1847, 1876, 1925, 1940 and 1965. They tend to be centered around Cape Cod and the South Coast.
Massachusetts tends to get a major quake every 1000 years. 1755 may have been it, so we're most likely off the hook for a while.
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