In what could be the world’s largest case of mistaken identity, both Melbourne Australia and Melbourne USA were rocked by earthquakes last night, with the two cities feeling the shakes just hours apart.
Melbourne in Florida was rocked by a magnitude 4.0 earthquake at about 11pm on Wednesday local time. The event was described by local news outlets as “rare” and was the first time an earthquake had struck the southern state since 2006.
“If you thought you experienced some unexpected rumbling late Wednesday night, it wasn’t from a rocket launch on Cape Canaveral. It was from a rare earthquake off Florida’s east coast,” local newspaper the Orlando Sentinel reported.
Just hours later, the superior Melbourne here in Australia was also struck, with a magnitude 4.3 earthquake being felt across the city.
The epicentre of the quake was near Leongatha, the South Gippsland town about 135 kilometres south-east of the CBD.
The Bureau of Meteorology predicted the quake to be about 7km deep, and said it posed no tsunami threat to the city.
“I’m sure that a lot of people across the city have felt this one and there may be aftershocks continuing, so we’ll see,” Seismology Research Centre scientist Adam Pascale said in a video on X (formally Twitter).
Residents across Melbourne took to social media, and more than 5,300 reported feeling the shock on the Geoscience Australia website.
Pascale said the earthquake was recorded on a seismograph in the regional town of Korumburra that was installed after a magnitude 4.7 quake there in 2009.
“We have certainly been feeling more earthquakes in the last couple of years than we have in the decade or two previous, but it’s still sort of within the normal range of activity for our region of the world,” he said.
It wasn’t the first quake detected by the research centre this week. Just three days ago, a magnitude 3.1 shake was recorded near Dumbalk.
Its epicentre was just 10 kilometres from today’s stronger quake. Since Melbourne was struck by a major earthquake in 2021, Victoria has felt a number of large tremors across the region, including a magnitude 5.0 quake in October and a magnitude 4.6 quake in the state’s alpine region in July.
However despite this, scientists say they cannot predict if a large earthquake is coming, as unlike other countries Australia does not have an early warning detection system installed.
