Hong Kong — A light earthquake rattled Beijing overnight, waking residents and sending students rushing from their dorms as videos of shaking living rooms went viral on Chinese social media on Wednesday.
The 4.5-magnitude quake struck a suburb of the nearby port city of Tianjin at 01:21 a.m. local time at a depth of ten kilometers (6.2 miles), according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS).
The China Earthquake Networks Center measured the quake at a magnitude of 4.2 and a depth of 20 kilometers (12.4 miles), placing the epicentre in Yongqing county in neighbouring Hebei province.
The epicentre was only 13 kilometers from Beijing at the closest point, the Beijing Earthquake Agency said, with tremors felt strongly in some areas of the Chinese capital.
“It did not cause any structural damage to buildings in the city and will not impact the normal functioning of daily life or production,” the agency said in an statement. The quake would not influence seismic activity in the city, it added.
Beijing, a metropolis of 22 million people, has periodically been affected by tremors from earthquakes nearby. The Beijing plain is a seismically active area and home to more than a dozen seismic fault lines, including one that runs from the city’s Shunyi district in the northeast through downtown.
But for many residents, tremors strong enough to wake them in the middle of the night were a novel experience.
The quake was among the top trending topics on Chinese social media platforms on Wednesday, with many Beijingers posting videos of swaying ceiling lights and sharing their experiences of waking up to their bedrooms quivering. (CNN)
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