Hundreds of people were jolted out of their sleep early yesterday morning when a sea tremor rattled the island, 15 hours after another minor earthquake.
Nobody was injured and no damages were reported despite the tremor measuring 4.7 on the Richter scale. The tremor's epicentre was 120 kilometres east of the island.
The shake, at about 5.40 a.m., was strong enough to force people out into the streets, and the Civil Protection Department was inundated with phone calls from people who feared the worst.
"Since we had no reports of injuries or damage, all we could do was calm everyone down - and there were quite a few alarmed people," CPD director Peter Cordina told The Times. Mr Cordina said the tremor was felt in all parts of the island and especially by people living in high-rise buildings.
John Bonello, who lives in Balluta, said he was woken up when he heard a clothes hanger rattling against a wardrobe.
"In my mind it lasted quite a few seconds and with the same intensity - I immediately realised it was a tremor," he said.
Cynthia Busuttil, of Paola, felt her bed shaking back and forth, cutting short her sleep.
"I got up and logged on to the internet to check whether the shake was part of the dream," she said.
Though it seemed to have a lesser impact on the ground, an earthquake of magnitude 4.8 occurred on Thursday at 2.32 p.m., about 150 kilometres to the west of Malta. An aftershock of this event, of magnitude 3.5, was recorded about 24 minutes later. The two events were unrelated.
The quakes were recorded at Wied Dalam station, operated by the university's Physics Department. Seismologist Pauline Galea said that although the magnitude of these events are quite big compared to the mean magnitude for this region, they are too small to cause a tsunami.
She explained that Thursday's event occurred on one of the submarine faults forming part of the Sicily Channel rift system. The morning shock was probably related to the Malta escarpment, a steep slope in the seabed that separates the Malta platform from the Ionian Sea.
Several small earthquakes that are undetected by people take place around Malta, though Greece and Sicily are the Mediterranean's most active zones.
The CPD has drawn up a contingency plan in case of a natural disaster and, incidentally, this morning is expected to carry out an exercise in this context.
Asked whether Malta had enough resources to cope with a disastrous earthquake, Mr Cordina explained that the police, the armed forces and NGOs would be roped in if a natural disaster were to occur. Malta can also rely on help from its EU partners if the situation gets out of hand.
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