By Tanya Faulkner
Several Victorians were rudely awakened in the early hours of the morning by one of the biggest earthquakes in recent months.
Thousands of people have reported feeling the early morning earthquake that has struck Rawson, approximately 11 kilometres northeast of Woods Point, approximately 126 kilometres east-northeast of Melbourne
Geoscience Australia reports the earthquake struck at 1.32am and they have been notified by more than 7,000 people that they had felt the quake.
According to the ‘Felt it’ scatter map, the tremor was felt widely across central and eastern Victoria including metropolitan Melbourne, Geelong and to the Vic-NSW border.
Many of those who felt the quake took to Facebook in the early hours of this morning to share their experience, with some reports of furniture toppling over, shaking plates, even beds ‘jumping’ during the earthquake.
This is the second earthquake to hit the region in the last month following a 3.8-magnitude earthquake in Melbourne’s north-west in late May.
More than 22,000 people reported feeling that tremor, which struck just before midday on a Sunday.
The Seismology Research Centre says this mornings’ earthquake is the largest recorded in the state since a major quake in September 2021, occurring at a depth of seven kilometres, according to GeoScience Australia.
A recent tweet on Twitter by the Centre said Woods Point in Victoria’s East continues to have aftershocks to the magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck in September 2021, stating this mornings’ magnitude 4.5 earthquake is the largest since the sequence began almost two years ago.
Over 1500 earthquakes have now been recorded in the area since the September 2021 earthquake.
