On the 4th of March 2023 at 03:45 UTC a magnitude M3.0 earthquake occurred in the Rockall Plateau in the North Atlantic, approximately 600km northwest of Donegal. The earthquake located with a depth of 10 km. In the map below the epicentre of the earthquake is indicated with a red marker. Major fault zones in and around Ireland are shown with red lines. While earthquakes in the Rockall Trough are regularly detected by the INSN, only one previous event has been detected from the Rockall Plateau – a M3.5 earthquake from the 10th of January 2016. As the nearest land-based seismometers are 500km from the Rockall Plateau, only larger magnitude (M2.5+) events are expected to be detected from this region. Earthquakes with magnitudes up to M4 are known to occur in the Rockall Trough.
The event was recorded by the Irish National Seismic Network (INSN) and can be seen in the waveforms plotted below:
