By Tanya Steele
Residents in Melbourne’s outer east have felt the earth move for the third time in the last two weeks as a 3.8 magnitude shake with a depth of around 2km hit the region at 11.40 pm on Sunday 29.
As of 1.30am, 20,732 felt reports have been made by the community via the Earthquakes@GA website.
Most of the reports are centred around Melbourne, but there are some as far north as Bendigo and as far south as Hobart.
In recent weeks, two minor magnitude 2.0 earthquakes occurred on Monday 22 May and Tuesday 16 May.
Both were felt up into the Dandenong Ranges and Senior Seismologist Hugh Glanville at Geoscience Australia said they were quite small quakes and not uncommon.
“Currently, we have a magnitude 2.0 for the one on 22 May, which may get revised up or down slightly,” he said.
Mr Glanville said the shake on 16 May was very similar to the one on 22 May they had quite a shallow depth of around two kilometres.
“That’s quite normal for the area and it’s a very small earthquake, it was only felt locally, not throughout Melbourne, so it was a very small, very minor earthquake,” he said.
Mr Glanville said they are generally random and that occasionally there may be foreshocks but that these events are not that common.
“You do get, correlations in place and times that you will have little sequences of earthquakes,” he said.
Geoscience keeps watch on areas that are more seismically active, to be alert for patterns of activity ahead of larger events.
“There are lots of earthquakes in the Wheatbelt in WA, so around areas like that they have earthquake swarms, where they have hundreds of small magnitude earthquakes in months or years in the same location,” said Mr Glanville.
“You want to continue to analyse these to see if these are precursors to my activity or major events,” he said.
“When they’re under populated area, people feel it, but even out of town a bit you might not get any felt reports,” Mr Glanville said.
“So the more information we get in, the more we can verify the models of how far shaking is expected to travel and how strongly it’ll travel,” he said.
In the last five years, four other earthquakes of magnitude three or greater have been recorded in Victoria, including a 5.9 magnitude north of Rawson in 2021 which caused some localised damage.
The public can access the Geoscience website to see areas where “felt’ reports have been lodged in their areas.
