Scots village rocked by earthquake ‘like an explosion' that wakes residents and shakes houses

Scottish Sun

16-06-2025

Locals were woken in the early hours of the morning by the "shaking", with some residents describing it as sounding like "thunder"
TREMOR SCARE Scots village rocked by earthquake 'like an explosion' that wakes residents and shakes houses
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A TINY village has been rocked by an earthquake that "sounded like a big explosion".
Comrie in Perth and Kinross was hit by tremors today, the third incident of its kind in the area since Friday.
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Comrie has been rocked by a series of tremors in recent days
Credit: Google Maps
Locals were woken in the early hours of the morning by the "shaking", with some residents describing it as sounding like "thunder".
Some people in the village heard a "loud booming with low rumble and shaking", while others said it "felt like a quarry blast" and "sounded like an explosion".
The 1.4 magnitude earthquake was recorded by the British Geological Survey at 2.18am.
The epicentre was a few miles north of Comrie at a depth of 2km.
Then 33 minutes later a 0.9 magnitude tremor was recorded in the same area.
On Friday, a 1.0 magnitude quake was picked up by recording equipment.
Comrie, home to around 1,900 people, is known as one of the most seismically active areas in the UK.
The village's Earthquake House houses one of the world's first seismometers, still in use today.
The largest known Scottish earthquake occurred near Loch Awe in 1880, with a magnitude of 5.2 on the Richter scale.
Earthquakes in Scotland are most often attributed to glacial rebound. Until about 10,500 years ago much of the north of the UK was covered by a thick layer of ice - which pushed the rocks down into the underlying mantle.
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These rocks have been slowly rising back up ever since the ice melted, causing occasional earthquakes in the process.
The UK is also subject to tectonic stresses caused by the expansion of the Atlantic Ocean, which is slowly pushing the entire of Eurasia to the east, and from the northward motion of Africa, which is pushing into Europe from the south.
The most damaging UK earthquake was in the Colchester area in 1884. Some 1200 buildings needed repairs, chimneys collapsed and walls were cracked.
Scotland has been battered by more than 4,000 earthquakes in the past 50 years but few have significantly impacted residents.