3rd earthquake shakes the ground off the Maine coast

By Christopher Burns, Bangor Daily News Staff

A third earthquake has shaken the ground off the coast of southern Maine.

The magnitude 2 temblor struck about 7:57 a.m. Sunday, Feb. 2 about eight miles off the coast of York Harbor at a depth of more than seven miles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

That comes on the heels of a magnitude 3.8 quake that hit last Monday and another magnitude 2 that shook the ground Jan. 29. Those three quakes were all clustered in the same area off the coast of York Harbor.

Since 1997, there have been more than 150 recorded earthquakes in the state, according to the agency.

The strongest quake in recent memory occurred on Oct. 16, 2012, when a 4.5 magnitude earthquake shook the ground in East Waterboro, according to the Maine Geological Survey. But Maine has felt the impact of much larger earthquakes that hit as far away as Plattsburg, New York, and Quebec City.

Recorded quakes tend to be clustered near Passamaquoddy Bay, the Dover-Foxcroft-Milo area, and southwestern Maine. Of course, earthquakes have been felt across Maine, even as far north as the St. John Valley, according to a Maine Geological Survey report.

Every so often quakes happen in clusters. That happened near Jonesboro between Aug. 11 and Sept. 1, 2022, when about nine earthquakes ranging from magnitude 1.7 to 3 shook the ground. Before that there was the cluster of six quakes east of Cadillac Mountain on Mount Desert Island from Sept. 22 to Dec. 29, 2006, the strongest of which measured a magnitude 4.2.