A small earthquake struck New York City. How often does that happen?

When Renata De Oliveira and her husband were woken early Tuesday morning by a loud bang that rattled the windows of their Roosevelt Island apartment, she thought her upstairs neighbor might have had a bad fall, or that there might be a problem with the heating of her building. system.

But the culprit, it turned out, was a small earthquake. On Roosevelt Island and other parts of New York City, people reported feeling their buildings shaking or hearing loud noises around 5:45 a.m. the United States Geological Survey recorded an earthquake measuring 1.7 on the Richter scale in Astoria, Queens.

“I was very confused because I was sleeping so deeply,” said Ms. De Oliveira, 58. After calling her building’s front desk, Ms. De Oliveira said she went to the lobby to try to find out more come to terms with what had happened. Scores of others had gathered in their pajamas when firefighters arrived and an investigation began. After about 45 minutes, firefighters informed the crowd that the building was safe and they could return to their apartments.

Fire officials said no one was injured and no power outages or damage to infrastructure were reported, said Alfonso Quiroz, a spokesman for Con Edison. Although there were initial reports of an explosion on Roosevelt Island, located between Manhattan and Queens, these turned out to be unfounded.

New York City may not be known for its seismic activity, but in reality the area experiences numerous small earthquakes every year, according to Thomas Pratt, a research geophysicist for the US Geological Survey. Most of the time, these tremors go unnoticed, he said.

Most people wouldn’t notice a magnitude 1.7 earthquake, Mr. Pratt said, but Tuesday’s event occurred relatively close to the Earth’s surface. Earthquakes usually start somewhere between 2.5 and 12.5 miles underground, he explained, and the Queens earthquake occurred about three miles deep.

Although most earthquakes in the Northeast go unnoticed, New Yorkers have felt several earthquakes over the years. An earthquake with a magnitude of 2.2 on the Richter scale shook parts of New York and New Jersey in May last year a magnitude 3.6 earthquake shook the city of Adams Center the month before. In 2011, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake in Virginia led to the evacuation of Manhattan’s City Hall and Midtown office buildings.

The most significant tremors recorded in New York City occurred in 1884, Mr. Pratt said, when a magnitude 5.2 earthquake rumbled from beneath Coney Island.

While places like California, which are notorious for frequent and more damaging earthquakes, sit on the edges of tectonic plates — large portions of the Earth’s surface that interact with each other and cause earthquakes or other geological events — New York City does not, Mr. Pratt said. . But that wasn’t always the case, he said.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, the land that would eventually become New York was a place where continents collided and great earthquakes shook the earth below, Mr. Pratt said.

The fault lines that run through the Mid-Atlantic region have become less active over time, but the Earth beneath New York is still releasing stress from that period, said John C. Mutter, professor of earth and environmental studies at Columbia University.

“A lot of what you feel here, these little earthquakes, are a resolution of the tensions of the past,” he said. The contractions of what was a very active plate boundary a long time ago won’t just stop, he added. “It will take a while before everything is in order.”

It is extremely unlikely that the city will experience a major earthquake that would cause significant structural damage, Mr. Mutter said, but New Yorkers should still be aware of how to respond in the event of an earthquake.

“The problem with buildings in New York City — and you see it all the time with scaffolding structures — is that the facades are often quite fragile,” Mr. Mutter said, explaining that neither the people who build buildings in New York City nor the people who live in them, usually plan for earthquakes. “If you had a reasonably decent earthquake, in New York you would see air conditioners falling out of windows, or flower boxes, or ornate facades.”

But more often than not, Mr. Mutter said, even noticeable earthquakes cause no real damage in New York City. The ground might shake a little, he said, or a book might fall off a shelf.

Even sewer lines, water pipes and other underground infrastructure are unlikely to be affected by an earthquake, both Mr. Mutter and Mr. Pratt said. Some damage could occur in the extremely unlikely event of a magnitude 4 or 4.5 earthquake, Mr. Pratt said, or if infrastructure had already been damaged.

“Maybe if a sewer pipe or something like that was already very weak, but that would be unusual,” Mr Pratt said. ‘People are more likely to hear a sound or feel that the house is shaking. People often report that it sounds like a sonic boom or an explosion.”