Here's why you might have felt the New York earthquake in Ontario

As an earthquake shook New York City on Friday morning, some Ontario residents felt rumblings.

As an earthquake shook New York City on Friday morning, some Ontario residents felt rumblings.

Around 10:25 a.m., Harsim Randhawa was on the seventh floor of an office building in Waterloo, Ont. “I felt the building vibrate,” he said.

It was a small shake, but he felt it, and messaged others to spread the news. “They said people are probably moving stuff somewhere in the building,”Randhawa said.

Ten minutes later, news broke of an earthquake in New York, with a preliminary magnitude of 4.8 at its centre.

It wasn’t just Randhawa who felt the rumble. Hundreds of submissions poured into the United States Geological Survey’s (USGC) “Did you feel it?” map, which pools community data based on where people noticed the earthquake. In Canada, reports were filed in Toronto, Niagara, Hamilton, Kitchener, Belleville, Ottawa and Montreal.

Michal Kolaj, a seismologist with Natural Resources Canada, said it’s “certainly possible” people in Toronto felt the quake. “It would have been [a] very weak shaking,” he added.

Kolaj explained earthquakes in eastern North America travel farther distances than in the west.