Island residents shaken by series of earthquakes

A number of earthquakes have struck the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides.

The British Geological Survey (BGS) said a 3.3-magnitude quake hit at 7.30pm on Monday, followed by a series of five smaller ones.

It said movement from the 3.3 quake was felt on Mull, on surrounding islands and on the Scottish mainland, mainly from within around 50km of the epicentre.

Mull resident Alasdair Satchel, 45, said he thought a car had crashed into his home when he felt a quake.

“I was sitting at my desk about 7.30pm last night and heard a very big bang, then another very big bang and the house shook,” the film, theatre and podcast maker told the PA news agency.

“I went outside to see what happened as my wife had been taking my father-in-law home to the house, but he lives just down from us and it was icy outside, and I wondered if the car had slipped and hit the house.

“It was a very unusual experience, but brought a lot of people together in a very quick and unexpected way.”

Tiree resident and civil servant Richard Cooke, 35, told PA he was getting ready for dinner when he “felt the room shake”.

“I thought it was a plane at first as we live near the airport,” he said.

Reports described people saying “the whole house creaked”, “all the windows and doors rattled” and “the sofa seemed to vibrate”.

Others told BGS they “thought someone had crashed into the house” and “it was like a large explosion nearby”.

Some people took to social media to share their experience of the quakes, which had their epicentres in the north west of Mull near the village of Dervaig.

One person on the island posted on X, formerly Twitter: “Anyone else here on the Isle of Mull think we’ve had a couple of earth tremors this evening? Like a rumbling train in a tunnel and lasting for a good number of seconds.”

Another person wrote: “We heard a weird bang and the glasses and plates in the dresser started rattling.”

Earlier on Monday, a 2.3-magnitude earthquake was recorded at Moidart in the Highlands at around 2.24pm, while a 1.1-magnitude quake hit Morvern, also in the Highlands, at 1.10pm.

All the quakes were at a depth of 7km, apart from a quake at 7.38pm on Mull which measured one on the Richter scale and was at a depth of 6km.

David Galloway, a seismologist with the BGS, said Mull experienced six quakes in the space of around 10 minutes on Monday evening, ranging between one and 3.3 on the Richter scale.

He said: “We get around 300 earthquakes a year in the UK and north west Scotland is one of the most active places.

“We live in a dynamic planet, there are lots of plates moving about. There are stresses in the rocks and movement in the earth’s crust, and in the UK every now and then the stress exceeds the strength of the rock and there will be a little earthquake.

“The 3.3-quake on Mull was very small on a world basis but on a UK basis it is a moderate earthquake.”