Early A.M. Booms From 1.7 Magnitude Quake in Queens Startles Roosevelt Islanders
A 1.7 magnitude earthquake hit Astoria in the early morning hours of Jan. 2, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Some residents of Roosevelt Island experienced power outages. A research geophysicist with the USGS told Straus News why Manhattanites were affected–if not catastrophically injured–by the quake.
| 09 Jan 2024 | 11:26
A USGS map displaying a 1.7 magnitude earthquake that struck more than a half mile underground in Queens, rattled people on Roosevelt Island on Jan. 2. While authorities say that nobody was injured by the early-morning event, some residents were awakened around 6 a.m. by what they initially thought was an explosion. (
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Booming convulsions rattled a few residents of Roosevelt Island around 6 a.m. on Jan. 2, with FDNY trucks being dispatched to investigate whether an explosion had taken place. It hadn’t. Instead, a 1.7 magnitude earthquake had occurred more than a half mile under the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, according to a report by the U.S. Geological Survey.
NYC Emergency Management echoed the findings in a thread on social media. It noted that the “DOB, FDNY, NYPD, 311, MTA, Con Ed, and National Grid report no injuries, no impacts to transit, traffic, or utility services, and no structural stability issues at this time.”
However, sleep was certainly temporarily disturbed. Maria Grant, who lives on Roosevelt Island, told CBS New York that the earthquake “blew me out of my bed.”
Thomas Pratt, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Geologic Hazards Science Center–where he researches the seismic imaging of fault systems and the “tectonic settings of earthquakes”–spoke to Straus News about why the Queens quake was felt across the East River most notably on Roosevelt Island.
Pratt said, the quake was “very shallow, only a few kilometers deep.” Specifically, it was only 5 km (0.62 miles) from the surface. Secondly, “the rocks in the eastern U.S. are much harder and older than the rocks in the western U.S,” which means that seismic waves travel farther. Therefore, it’s not that surprising that Roosevelt Island residents would’ve been disturbed by the Queens quake from a relatively short distance away.
Pratt noted that a truly massive seismic event–such as the 1886 Charleston earthquake in South Carolina which was the largest recorded on the East Coast and killed 60 people registered 7.3 on the Richter scale–but they are statistically rare. However, he doesn’t want people to have illusions about whether or not earthquakes can affect cities such as NYC.
There have indeed been some much larger quakes on the East Coast, at least relative to the Jan. 2 shake-rattle-and-roll in Queens. On Aug. 23, 2011, a 5.8 magnitude quake that hit northern Virginia was experienced all the way in Manhattan, even though it caused only minor damage to NYC buildings. The USGS notably called it the United State’s “most widely felt earthquake.”
Two other East Coast earthquakes that originated in New York State have made the region’s top ten “biggest” list, at least according to one compiled by Scientific American in 2011. A 5.8 magnitude quake–which would make it tied with 2011’s Virginia Quake–hit Massena on Sep. 5, 1944. A 5.5 magnitude quake also hit Brooklyn on August 10, 1884, and is still considered to have provided the most intense quake tremors in NYC yet.
However, smaller quakes happen a lot more frequently. “Earthquakes with a magnitude of 1.5 to 2.5 occur dozens of time a year on the eastern coast of the U.S.,” Pratt said, adding that the Queens quake “happened to be under New York.”