Denmark was struck by an earthquake at 4:14 p.m. on Wednesday, which, according to the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), measured 3.9 on the Richter scale.
GEUS said the quake’s epicenter was in Køge Bay, south of Copenhagen. Foreign organizations placed the epicenter farther west, off Bjæverskov.
Several residents in the capital region and elsewhere on Zealand reported Wednesday afternoon that they had felt strong shaking.
House shook, doors rattled
One of them was Anne Sietske de Boer, who lives in Allerslev, in Lejre. Her first thought was that someone must have been unloading firewood when, at 4:14 p.m., she felt the whole house shake.
»It felt like my house was about to collapse. The house shook, and the doors rattled«, Anne Sietske de Boer says.
She lives about 20 kilometers from the quake’s presumed epicenter.
This was not the first time Anne Sietske de Boer has experienced an earthquake. She also felt the quake that struck Skåne in 2008.
The 2008 quake was the largest ever measured in or around Denmark, at 4.8 on the Richter scale. The next largest were an earthquake in 1985 that measured 4.7 and struck the seabed north of Gilleleje in North Zealand, and an earthquake in 1954 that measured 4.6 and struck southwest of Thisted in northern Jutland.
The most recent larger quake was in 2012. It measured 4.3 on the Richter scale and struck in the middle of the Kattegat.
Could be felt on Funen
According to geophysicist Bo Holm Jacobsen of Aarhus University, Wednesday’s earthquake was a so-called fault rupture. He said it involved a small break underground, between 100 meters and a kilometer long, near the epicenter in the area around Køge.
»This quake is clearly on the mild end, and for most people it will feel like a heavy truck driving by. If it had happened in Greece or Turkey, people would have shrugged and said to each other: »There was another one««, said Bo Holm Jacobsen, an emeritus associate professor at the Department of Geoscience.
Although the quake was small by international standards, it could be felt in several places in Denmark and Sweden. Several media outlets reported that it was felt on Sjællands Odde, on Funen, and in Malmö.
Copenhagen’s emergency services received so many calls Wednesday afternoon that they asked people to call only if they had urgent problems.
Bo Holm Jacobsen said the quake may have caused minor damage, but he expects any effects to be extremely limited.
»If your house was right on the verge of developing a crack, then it’s possible this quake made the crack visible. But it could just as easily be that because you felt the shaking, you look a little more closely and then notice a crack that was already there«, he says.
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