Firstly, report a potential earthquake if you think you have experienced an earthquake — we’d be really grateful.

Even if we already know about an earthquake and know its magnitude and location, people’s felt experiences of an earthquake can provide valuable information about how the size and location of the earthquake translates into ground movement at any given point. Our analysts also normally process earthquakes in chronological order. If we start to receive felt reports, we prioritise processing that time range.

You can check to see if there has been any recent seismic activity in your area by checking our web pages, which contains information about earthquake activity in and around the British Isles in the last 60 days.

There can be several reasons for no evidence of a seismic disturbance being detected by the BGS seismograph network in your area, at the time and date you are enquiring about.

We record 20 to 30 earthquakes in the UK every year that are large enough to be felt by people, as well as many other smaller earthquakes that aren’t felt. However, we can’t detect all small earthquakes, so it is possible that you have felt an event that our instruments have not detected. Please report a potential earthquake, whether or not we have already detected it.

In many cases, our seismometers detect background noise from nearby human activity, which can be a particular problem in areas of high population density. If it is related to heavy traffic and industry or construction work, for example, we can often see that this activity shows a diurnal variation (differences between day and night time) and sometimes variations across week and weekend days too.

Noise from these sources is usually strongly localised and will only be recorded by nearby stations, whereas signals from seismic events such as earthquakes will be recorded at greater distances, so combining data from multiple sites helps us to detect more accurately.

Seismic events for which there is strong evidence that they have been induced by human activities are listed on our website.

Yes! You can access helicorder plots of the data for the last few days for each monitoring station  on our website.

These charts show only one of the (at least three) components that each station has. You have the option to display a plot filtered by either ‘very long period’ or ‘short period’. The very long period has been filtered to make it better at showing large, distant earthquakes. The short period data has been filtered to make it better at showing smaller, more local earthquakes.

These are available in several different places.

• Our website lists earthquakes that have occurred over the last 50 days. We maintain separate web pages for events that we think are tectonic in origen or events that we think are induced by human activity
• We have an online database search that allows you to specify and area, time and magnitude to search, and gives you a list of earthquakes that is excellent for putting into a spreadsheet
• We contribute all identified earthquakes to the International Seismological Centre’s catalogue of earthquake activity around the world
• Our Onshore GeoIndex allows you to display earthquake locations on a map and to view images of seismic data from stations

• BGS seismic station locations

A modern seismic station consists of an inspection cover, under which is there is a sensor that looks a bit like an upturned metal bucket.

• Images of seismic stations

Seismometers are very sensitive to ground motion; most of our seismic stations are in remote locations so that they aren’t distributed by people walking or driving past. These constitute a source of seismic noise that might hinder their ability to detect earthquakes.

Unfortunately we can’t help to implement your new prediction methods. New scientific discoveries need to be disseminated via publication in reputable, peer-reviewed scientific journals. Your first step would be to publish your science for it to be reviewed by other experts and BGS is not able to help with this.

• More information on international efforts to improve earthquake forecasting

BGS is unable to help to monitor damage caused by vibrations. There are commercial companies that specialise in carrying out this kind of vibration monitoring.

We go to a lot of effort to monitor and maintain our network, but faults can affect any technical equipment and our monitoring equipment is no different.

Most of our sites are in very remote rural areas where mains power can be less reliable. Where solar power is used, we can have problems in winter due to lack of light and solar panels can be damaged in storms, as can mains power lines.

For data transmission, we use a mixture of 3G, Satellite and ADSL. Reception of the 3G signal can be highly variable, satellite systems can be negatively affected by heavy rain/snow and when ADSL lines go down it can take a long time to get a repair done.

The monitoring equipment itself is also complex and can, from time to time, develop faults unrelated to any external factor.

Any of these issues could result in gaps in the data.

One of the challenges of seismology is that a source of ground motion that is small but close to a seismometer can cause it to record a ground motion that is larger than a powerful earthquake that is much further away. That means, for instance, that someone working in a field next to one of our sensors might create a signal that looks like an earthquake. That’s one of the reasons we need a network of sensors. We only treat something as an earthquake if we see it on multiple sensors. An event that is only seen on one sensor could just be a source of local noise that is very close.

No, definitely not! The smallest size of earthquake detected depends on the density of seismic monitoring stations: the more stations in an area, the smaller the earthquakes that can be detected. For the majority of mainland Britain, we would expect to be able to detect any earthquake of 2.0ML or above. In some places where we have more stations we can detect far smaller earthquakes. For instance, when we were monitoring an earthquake swarm near Gatwick Airport we were detecting earthquakes as small as -0.6ML.

That’s a more complex question than you may realise. The amount of shaking that you might feel is a function of the size (magnitude) of the earthquake, its distance from you, the type of building you are in and how high up in it you are, and the local geology. To what extent you might notice it will depend on what you are doing (asleep or awake; stood up or lying down) and how much human vibration is also being produced (for instance, if you live by a Tube line in London).

What we can say is we usually tend to start getting felt reports for earthquakes with local magnitude of 2 and above, but sometimes larger ones are not felt (or if felt, not reported) and sometimes smaller ones are felt and reported.

Each year we detect 200 to 300 earthquakes in the UK, but only 20 to 30 of them are felt.

We aim to provide the locations and magnitudes for the earthquakes that we detect as soon as possible after they occur. Usually, this process involves using measurements from as many monitoring stations as possible. However, sometimes, data from a station that would have recorded the earthquake may not be available because of data transmission or other problems. Adding measurements from these stations later may result in small changes to the location and magnitude.

We make the data from our monitoring stations available to agencies such as the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS)’s National Earthquake Information Center to help detect and locate earthquakes from all around the world. These agencies, however, are primarily only interested in large or potentially damaging earthquakes and they may use only a subset of the available data for smaller earthquakes in the UK. This means that their estimates of the locations and magnitudes may differ from estimates that use all available data.

Detecting and locating large and damaging earthquakes, as the EMSC and the USGS do,  involves processing a huge amount of data, so they use automatic methods that allow them to estimate the location and magnitude of events very quickly. These automatic estimates are often published before they are reviewed by a human analyst. While we also use these automatic methods, all the events that we report are reviewed by a human analyst before they are published, so our location and magnitude estimates may not be available as quickly. Very occasionally, the automatic methods can get things wrong but these are usually corrected after review.

Musson, R M W, and Sargeant, S. 2008. UK earthquake monitoring 2007/2008. British Geological Survey Open Report OR/08/072. (Edinburgh, UK: British Geological Survey.) (Unpublished.)