A minor earthquake has struck Victoria this morning.
The magnitude 3.4 earthquake was recorded near Hamilton in the state’s southwest at 5.09am on Thursday. The quake occurred at a depth of 3km.
One Hamilton resident said she felt her bedroom window rattle.
‘It woke me up,’ another said.
Hamilton had a population of almost 5,000 people in the 2021 census.
It comes after a magnitude 3.0 quake struck 500km away in Sandy Point near Wilsons Promontory, southeast of Melbourne‘s CBD, on Monday.
The quake was recorded at 7.54pm at a depth of 10km.
The earthquakes follow a larger magnitude 4.1 tremor that struck the town of Woods Point in Victoria’s High Country on August 7.
The magnitude 3.4 earthquake was recorded near Hamilton in Victoria’s southwest at 5.09am on Thursday (pictured is a Geoscience map of the quake)
One Hamilton resident said she felt her bedroom window ‘rattle’ (pictured a CSEM EMSC map)
The quake is understood to have been an aftershock of an even larger magnitude 5.9 earthquake that rocked the state in September 2021.
That quake damaged buildings in Melbourne and was felt as far away as Canberra, Sydney and Adelaide after spreading from its epicentre in Mansfield, about 60km from Woods Point.
‘The physical size of the earthquake today was about 100th that of the earthquake that occurred in 2021,’ Prof Cummins told AAP.
‘The energy released would be… about nine hundred times less than than the energy released in that previous earthquake.’
There have been about a dozen earthquakes of magnitudes higher than three in the area since the 2021 event.
The tremor was felt as far away as South Morang in Melbourne’s north, Healesville in the Yarra Ranges, Wangaratta in the state’s north and Dargo in East Gippsland, according to Victoria’s State Emergency Service.
A Betty’s Burgers restaurant is seen partially collapsed on Chapel St in Melbourne’s inner-city after a magnitude 5.9 earthquake in September 2021
Aftershocks occurring years or decades after initial earthquakes were common, Prof Cummins said, and more could follow.
‘It’s not unusual for large aftershocks to have their own aftershocks,’ he said.
‘But I would expect the earthquakes we see immediately after this earthquake to be considerably smaller.’
While Australia didn’t have an active tectonic plate boundary like in New Guinea or New Zealand, stress from other boundaries slowly built up to the interior of the plate, eventually causing faults to fail, Prof Cummins said.
‘They just fail at a much lower rate than they would where near tectonic plate boundaries, where the strain rates are much faster,’ he said.
