Five earthquakes rattle Tennessee-North Carolina border in 4-hour span

(ETH) – A cluster of five earthquakes has rattled the Great Smoky Mountain National Park in east Tennessee early on Tuesday morning.  The USGS reported that the first quake was registered at 2:48 a.m. and the last quake was reported at 6:56 a.m. All the quakes were small, between magnitude 1.3 and 1.7 and the Richter scale.

The earthquake swarm took place in a small area about 25 miles southwest of Knoxville, near the North Carolina border. The strongest earthquake that has been documented in this particular seismic zone was a magnitude 4.6 earthquake that struck near Fort Payne, Alabama, on April 29, 2003.