A tremor in the northern areas of Cape Town on Monday was strong enough to be recognised as an earthquake, according to the Council for Geoscience.
The council said the quake, which registered 3,2 on the Richter scale, took place at 9am, with the epicentre in the Atlantis/Malmesbury area.
However, several residents of Atlantis said they had felt nothing, and police at the Malmesbury charge office said they only heard about it on the radio.
Cape Town’s head of disaster management Geoff Laskey said: ”We had lots of reports of people who felt the tremor, mostly out of the Table View area. No damage or injuries.”
Council for Geoscience seismologist Martin Brandt said from Pretoria that tremors in the Cape Town area were rare, though there was still regular activity in the Ceres/Tulbagh area, hit by a damaging earthquake in 1969.
That earthquake registered 6,3 on the Richter scale.
Brandt said that while the most common earthquake zones were along the edges of the earth’s shifting tectonic plates, South Africa was in the centre of the African plate.
Some geologists thought that tremors here might be triggered by vertical movement in the plate, but this was speculation.
”Really, your guess is as good as mine,” he said. – Sapa