Rare magnitude 4.8 earthquake rocks Northeast, including greater New York area

A magnitude 4.8 earthquake rocked the Northeast, including the Greater New York area, on Friday morning (April 5), according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

The earthquake struck at 10:23 a.m. EDT at a depth of 2.9 miles (4.7 kilometers), USGS reported. It hit 4.3 miles (7 km) north of Whitehouse Station in New Jersey, about 40 miles (64 km) from Manhattan.

Shaking was felt as far south as Baltimore, Maryland, and as far north as Springfield, Massachusetts, according to the USGS' "Did You Feel It?" map. Some airports on the East Coast issued ground stops to halt air traffic directly after the quake, but there were no immediate reports of damage, according to The New York Times.

Related: The 20 largest recorded earthquakes in History

Earthquakes in the Greater New York area are rare, but smaller and occasionally more powerful earthquakes have previously rattled this region spanning New York, Philadelphia and Wilmington. Smaller earthquakes hit around every two to three years, and larger ones strike roughly twice a century, according to USGS. 

"It's unusual to get really big earthquakes in the Northeast of the U.S., but you do occasionally get these intermediate-size earthquakes, which is what we had this morning," Benjamin Fernando, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences who studies seismology at Johns Hopkins University, told Live Science. 

Most earthquakes occur at tectonic plate boundaries, but the closest plate boundaries to New York City are in the center of the Atlantic Ocean and in the Caribbean Sea. The U.S. Northeast doesn't have tectonic plate subduction zones like those by California and the Pacific Northwest, Fernando said. These are places where a thinner plate dips beneath an adjacent, thicker one.