6:55 AM

6:20 PM

11 hours 1 minutes

New England is hardly the place we think a lot about earthquakes, though we get a pretty good jolt now and then. The majority of our quakes are known as mid-plate quakes, resulting from stresses in the middle of the North American plate – the large piece of the Earth’s crust that our continent is part of. Such was the case on the morning of this date in 1983. A minor earthquake at 6:20 AM EDT rattled some dishes, and a few nerves, but no damage was reported.