An earthquake shook parts of the Midlands on Monday afternoon.
Staffordshire and Shropshire residents reported a tremor, and some said their homes were swaying from side to side.
The British Geological Survey (BGS) issued an alert for seismic activity detected at 15.36 in Wem, Shropshire.
The BGS detected an 8 km underground quake with a magnitude of 3.8, the strongest in the UK for months.
Affected areas included Shrewsbury, Telford, Wellington, Stafford and Stoke-on-Trent.
Locals reported that closed doors and furniture moved while the shock waves traveled through Shropshire and the surrounding counties for a few seconds.
Caroline and Paul Blair, from Whitchurch about 10 miles away, told the Shropshire Star: “We were sitting watching TV and I heard a noise like a door closing if you left two doors open in the house.
“Then we noticed that our TV, which is on a stand, was moving and then the sofa where we were both sitting rocked. It was so weird, it was like someone was jumping on it.”
A Shrewsbury resident told the Birmingham Mail: “I felt the house shake from side to side for about three or four seconds. I was sitting on the couch and the whole room was moving, I had never felt an earthquake before. ”.
With a magnitude of 3.8 on the richest scale, the Wem earthquake falls below one place in the BGS list of significant British earthquakes, which records earthquakes of magnitude 4.0 or higher. No such earthquake has been detected since 2018.
The BGS records between 200 and 300 earthquakes each year, although only about 10% of them are felt.
The strongest earthquake ever recorded in the United Kingdom took place in June 1931 and measured a magnitude of 6.1, just 0.4 from what seismologists say is the strongest possible earthquake in Britain.
Although the UK is nowhere near the limit, earthquakes are still occurring due to local changes in the Earth’s crust caused by distant movements.