Trust me to be out of the UK when something tectonically interesting actually happens: a magnitude 5.2 earthquake sent the eastern Midlands trembling early this morning. The BGS press release (pdf) has some pretty seismograms but nothing really resembling useful information. The epicentre (red balloon) was just to the north of Market Rasen, in Lincolnshire.
Earthquakes powerful enough to shake anything more than seismometer needles are quite rare in Britain, and are mostly related to the collapse of old mine workings. Lincolnshire is on the wrong side of the country for the coal-fields, but it seems that there are Jurassic ironstone horizons in this part of the world, and there are some old mine workings at Claxby (blue balloon – some very sparse information buried here and here). It’s possible that a collapse in some of the deeper shafts could be the cause of the earthquake – but this is really just a guess, and the cause could be completely different.
Update: I’d be interested to here if British readers slept through it like Julia, or were shaken awake like hypocentre.
Updated update: From the look of this moment tensor solution it looks like hypocentre called it right in the comments . Although Bob is going for the more traditional explanation…
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