Officials: Mystery Solved, The Booms Were Earthquakes!

Editor's note:

Hey Montville! On Friday and again Monday I wrote about the Nov. 29 morning 'booms' heard in Groton and Mystic. I've since learned that Montville also had the earthquakes! Did you feel anything? Let me know in the comments below!

~ellyn

By Ellyn Santiago

According to the Town of Groton Office of Emergency Management, the booms we reported about on Friday morning in Mystic and Groton were in fact earthquakes. Albeit small ones. Here's the photo and story from the emergency management Facebook page:

"Yep.....it was an earthquake.
We don't know if the news media has picked up on it yet but ...The "booms” that were reported on Friday morning were, in fact, earthquakes.

We made an inquiry with the Western Observatory @ Boston College that morning. Apparently they were closed for the Thanksgiving weekend but just reported back to us that they did register two earthquakes (Friday Nov. 29) morning - the first at 9:05am and then again at 9:42am. Both quakes had the same magnitude of M1.8 and were both very shallow events meaning they were audible events. Small earthquakes at a very shallow depth are commonly heard and reported as sounding like explosions.

We have included a “picture” of the ground motion as recorded by the Western Observatory. I highlighted the seismic waveforms for you, surrounded by white boxes along the 09:00 horizontal (blue) line. 
Cool stuff."