A somewhat dramatic image of how an earthquake might look in Somerset...

Did the Earth move for you in Somerset on February 8? If so, here’s why…

Paul JonesFebruary 26, 20260 Comment0

DID the earth move for you at around 3pm on February 8 in the Chard area? And no, we’re not trying to find out if you were up to anything that day. Instead, recent data shows that between 3.04pm and 3.05pm on that Sunday afternoon, the area saw two earthquakes. Yes, earthquakes. In Chard.

The British Geological Survey (BGS), the UK’s national quake monitoring agency, detected two tremors that afternoon in the Chard area – just east of Forton and right next to Chard Reservoir, to be precise.

The first, near the reservoir at 17 seconds past 3.04pm, measured 1.2 on the Richter local magnitude scale (ML), while the second came in at a whopping 2ML, both at a depth of around 8km below the earth’s surface.

According to the scale, those two quakes in Somerset would be ‘scarcely felt’, with the BGS saying a rating of between one and two means “vibration is felt only by individual people at rest in houses, especially on upper floors of buildings”.

So you can ignore our rather dramatic image. Nothing like that is likely to happen (unless you think the potholes are getting really bad).

But, if the earth did move for you that afternoon, for whatever reason, you might not have just been enjoying yourself – it may actually have shifted.

Earthquakes in the UK are more common than many of us think, with 14 being detected by the BGS in February alone, from Somerset to Cumbria, Lancashire to Anglesey.

The strongest quake this month was the 2ML event in Chard, followed by a few measuring 1.4ML elsewhere, so nothing to worry about there, even if you felt anything.

Earthquakes occur when there is a sudden movement of rocks along a fault in the Earth, the BGS explained.

“As the rocks on either side of the fault move past each other, they send seismic waves through the Earth, radiating outwards like the ripples produced when a stone is dropped into a pond.”

So if you did feel something in Chard that day, it was an earthquake.

The last sizeable earthquake in Somerset came in December 2019, when a 3.5ML event struck an epicentre in Huntworth, near Bridgwater.

Tremors from that quake were felt from Yeovil to Burnham, with residents talking of a feeling “like if a lorry had passed at high speed”, and of milk bottles rattling on the worktop.