Small earthquakes are quite usual around Cheb. The ground shakes there due to a phenomenon called ‘earthquake swarms’. This type of seismic activity usually presents itself around a volcanically active region, but in rare cases, it features in places with no volcanoes at all. Thus, the Cheb earthquakes are quite a rare occurrence, because the last volcano that was ever there is at least 150 thousand years old according to geologists. These earthquakes should be very weak but on Thursday morning, the earth around Cheb was shaking with a magnitude of 2.9 points on the Richter scale. This was the strongest earthquake in months, and this time, it was not an earthquake swarm, but a single isolated incident without any aftershocks. Jana Doubravová from the Geophysical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic warns that it could be the start of a new swarm. It took place around 6:00, and could be felt by those who were awake even tens of kilometers far. However, it did not wake up most and reportedly did not cause any major damage, as it was no match for Czech, typically brick-built, houses. Even the strongest earthquake to occur around Cheb, the one in 1985, just cracked walls, toppled some chimneys and destroyed a few poorly stored pieces of crockery. Since Czechia does not lay on a major fault-line, tragedies connected to earthquakes do not tend to occur.
