‘Sussex earthquake’ turns out to be false alarm

A 3.0-magnitude earthquake reported to have struck the English Channel just off the Sussex coast on Thursday morning turned out to be a false alarm.

The European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) reported a tremor at around 9am.

They said the earthquake occurred at a depth of 7km and took place in the Channel 35km south of Camber and less than 50km away from Eastbourne.

But the British Geological Survey disputed the report, and the EMSC later deleted the reference to a tremor in the English Channel.

Glenn Ford, a seismic analyst at the BGS said that: “This appears to be a spurious event caused by the automated processes used by the EMSC. It may be a genuine signal,” he said, but their software may have confused two locations.

“There is a very good chance that it is data from another event they have listed six seconds later in northern Algeria.”

The EMSC has been contacted for comment.

An earthquake was felt in Sussex earlier this year, after the British Geological Survey (BGS) recorded a tremor at Gatwick in the early hours of 4 May.

One resident of Ifield Wood near Crawley, Sussex, said she had been woken up by the earthquake that day.

“As if I’m saying I’ve just been woken up by an earthquake again!!!!! What is happening,” she tweeted at the time.

Read more

Deeper fracking can lead to ten times risk of earthquakes: study