Cornwall has been rocked by the earthquake as locals describe the ‘burst like a magister hitting the house’

An earthquake has hit Cornwall, described by one local as hitting their house “like a mask”.

Residents in Helston, Penzance and Camborne were among those who reported the quake, which struck just before 1am on Sunday in Mount’s Bay, close to the Lizard peninsula.

The epicenter was at a depth of 13 km, with a magnitude of 2.7 on the Richter scale, according to preliminary information, the British Geological Survey (BGS) said.

A model used to measure seismic intensity suggested that the quake would cause nearby residents to feel rocking or shaking slightly, with visible shaking of many objects.

Locals in Cornwall who reported the quake to the BGS described it as “a moderate rumble” and “a bang and a jolt, as if a sledgehammer had hit the house”.

A resident of Penzance described the quake as “a big bump” where the walls shook “like a lorry had hit the house”, while a resident of Constantine said he heard “what sounded like like an explosion”.

Dr David Hawthorn from the BGS said it was “very common” for people to report hearing earthquakes rather than feeling them.

“It’s very common – it shakes things and makes noise,” Dr Hawthorn told BBC Cornwall. “One of the things we see very frequently is that earthquakes that occur during peak hours have much lower levels of reporting by people.

“They just assume the noise is a heavy goods vehicle or something falling off a shelf in the next building,” he added.

While the UK experiences around 200 to 300 earthquakes each year, only 20 or 30 are usually felt by people, while earthquakes of magnitude 3 or greater usually occur once in two years, Dr. Hawthorn said.

“So in that context, this earthquake is not unusual,” he added. “It is also worth nothing that the distribution of earthquakes is not common in the UK. We generally have more earthquakes in the west of the county – Cornwall, Wales, west Scotland.

“So again, in that context, just like a single earthquake, this doesn’t seem extremely unusual.

“It’s just that, like many things in geology, the occurrence of earthquakes doesn’t fit our understanding as humans. They just don’t come around often enough for us to get used to them.”