Gothamist
A non-profit newsroom, powered by WNYC.
Gothamist
Listen Live
News
'We're as active as California': What everyone needs to know about this week's earthquakes in NJ
By
Mike Hayes
Published Aug 7, 2025
Share
FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
Never miss a story
Email address
By submitting your information, you're agreeing to receive communications from New York Public Radio in accordance with our Terms .
Famartin via Wikimedia Commons
By
Mike Hayes
Published Aug 7, 2025
Share
FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
We rely on your support to make local news available to all
Make your contribution now and help Gothamist thrive in 2026. Donate today
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
The New York City region was rattled by two small earthquakes that struck New Jersey in the past week. Experts say that while it marks an uptick in seismic shaking in the area, it's no reason to fear the big one.
A magnitude 2.7 earthquake shook the region on Tuesday. Its epicenter was in Hillsdale, New Jersey, about an hour's drive north of NYC. Nearly 3,500 people reported feeling the effects of the quake to the U.S. Geological Survey’s “Did You Feel It?” website.
That quake occurred just three days after a slightly more powerful one just over 10 miles away in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. More than 11,000 reported feeling that temblor to the USGS.
No significant damage was reported from either earthquake, according to the USGS. However, they follow a much larger magnitude 4.8 earthquake that struck New Jersey on April 5 last year and was felt as far away as Boston and Philadelphia.
That quake had 200 recorded aftershocks, said Alexander Gates, a distinguished service professor at Rutgers University in Newark specializing in fault analysis. And two weeks ago, the state experienced six very small earthquakes in 24 hours.
“We are just in a very high seismically active period,” he said. “We’re as active as California right now.”
By comparison, Gates said, New Jersey and the New York metropolitan area had a total of 350 earthquakes between 1975 and 2024. “We had 200 in one year – and it's still going, so we're still active,” he said.
What New Jerseyans may not have realized before is that they live on a fault zone that runs east to west across the state and makes the region susceptible to earthquakes.
“Not a single fault. But a lot of parallel faults,” said James Davis, a research professor at Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. “Just imagine breaking something. It rarely breaks on a clean line. You might get a lot of fractures and splinters and things like that. That's what the earth does, too.”
Gates said these types of fault zones can become highly active and then stop completely for 20 to 30 years.
“That's what's basically happening. Once these [areas] get an earthquake, it relieves the stress, someplace else picks up,” he said.
Gates said that while seismologists can never be 100% sure that a deadly earthquake that causes extensive damage won’t hit the area anytime soon, the likelihood is “very low.”
“There's other things that are probably a lot more dangerous,” he said.
Davis agreed. The increase in activity does not suggest the possibility of a larger earthquake.
“Does that mean there won't be a magnitude 4 tomorrow? No, we just can't tell,” he said. Seismologists categorize magnitude 4s as light earthquakes expected to cause only minor damage.
Davis said that scientists in the field will be studying the latest seismic activity.
“We're going to learn from these earthquakes. I can't tell you right now what we're going to learn because it's too soon,” he said. “But it's not something that they should fear.”
Tagged
new jersey
Mike Hayes
Mike Hayes covers equity and access to opportunity in New Jersey. He joined WNYC and Gothamist in 2023. Before that, he worked as a freelance journalist writing about policing and criminal justice. He has written for ProPublica, CNN, HuffPost, BuzzFeed News and The Appeal. He is also the author of the book, “The Secret Files: Bill De Blasio, The NYPD, and the Broken Promises of Police Reform.” In 2019, he was a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists.
Read more
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
MORE news
Dump truck driver hits and kills cyclist on 34th Street in Midtown, NYPD says
It's the latest in a string of hit-and-run deaths in the city in recent months.
By
Liam Quigley
Published Sep 28, 2026 at 4:15 p.m. ET
New ingredient mandated for Latin American kitchen, restaurant plates in NJ
The Garden State now requires that corn masa dough and flour made and sold in the state be fortified with folic acid.
By
Arya Sundaram
News
New ingredient mandated for Latin American kitchen, restaurant plates in NJ
The Garden State now requires that corn masa dough and flour made and sold in the state be fortified with folic acid.
By
Arya Sundaram
A Brooklyn jail cell filled with smoke. The emergency button failed, a lawyer said.
By
Samantha Max
Crews launch tunnel machines to dig first new Hudson River rail tunnels since 1910
By
Michael Sol Warren
NYC nor’easter dries up after weather service reports minor flooding
By
Ramsey Khalifeh
Never miss a story
Catch up on the most important headlines with a roundup of essential NYC stories, delivered to your inbox daily.
Sign upEmail address
By submitting your information, you're agreeing to receive communications from New York Public Radio in accordance with our Terms .