Just as residents were getting ready to carve the Thanksgiving turkey west of Maine’s largest city, a pair of earthquakes shook the ground.
The first one, a magnitude of 1.4 on the richter scale, shook the ground southwest of Naples about 12:36 a.m. on November 27.
That was followed two minutes later by a tremor with a magnitude of 1.3 that hit, the U.S. Geological Survey reported.
New Hampshire was also struck by a 1.8 quake two days before the holiday, at 10:13 a.m. on November 25 near Kingston, a town just southwest of Maine’s southernmost town of Kittery.
Earlier this month, at 2:52 a.m. on November 9, a magnitude 2 shook northeast of Dover-Foxcroft.
Ten months ago a 3.8 was felt just south of York.
That one was felt throughout the New Hampshire coastal region and as far south as Boston and portions of coastal Rhode Island and Connecticut.
It is the unique makeup of New England’s land mass that allowed the effects to be felt so far from the epicenter, Sophie Coulson, assistant professor of geophysics in University of New Hampshire’s Department of Earth Sciences explained at the time.
“Where we are, we are surrounded by igneous rocks like granite, which are very dense and very structurally sound and solid,” Coulson said. “So they actually allow the shaking of earthquake waves to propagate through them for longer distances before the energy fades.”
The pent-up energy “doesn’t dissipate as quickly as it can in other regions because we’re on such solid ground,” she added
Since 1997, there have been more than 150 recorded earthquakes in Maine, according to federal officials.
The strongest quake in recent memory occurred Oct. 16, 2012, when a 4.5 shook the ground in Waterboro, according to the Maine Geological Survey.
The most-powerful recorded earthquake in the state occurred March 21, 1904, according to News Center Maine.
It was reported to be a 5.9 magnitude.
The epicenter was somewhere between Bar Harbor and Passamaquoddy Bay.
Earthquakes in northern New England are caused by the reactivation of old, often unmapped, faults rather than movement on a single, known fault line like those in California, according to DigitalMaine.com.
