A North Shore earthquake? It happened on Wednesday

The U.S. Geological Survey confirmed a 2.9 magnitude earthquake on Wednesday afternoon about 12 miles off the Kenilworth shoreline.

The agency reportedly received more than 400 responses to its “Did You Feel It?” program, which crowd-sources and maps information about earthquakes. A significant number of responses came from Evanston (59), Highland Park (37), Wilmette (16), Skokie (16) and Glencoe (12). Four responses came from Kenilworth residents.

No damage was reported, as is typical with earthquakes with a magnitude under 4, measured on a seismometer, according to the USGS. A 5.3 magnitude earthquake reportedly is considered “moderate” and 6.3 is “strong.”

Iconic Chicagoland weatherman Tom Skilling chimed in on the natural phenomenon, saying that the earthquake was centered 3.1 miles below the surface of Lake Michigan and no major fault lines exist in that area.

“It was likely the product of the bedrock beneath Lake Michigan still very slowly shifting and rebounding in the wake of the removal of the mass of ice from the last ice age,” Skilling wrote in a Facebook post, saying the process i called “isostatic rebound.”

“Because the Earth’s mantle behaves like a fluid, the crust sinks under the massive weight of glaciers and eventually ‘bounces back’ over thousands of years once the ice melts,” he wrote.

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