M1.6 Earthquake near Summit Park, Utah — 23 July 2026

Micro earthquakes are almost never felt at the surface and are recorded only by seismographs.

A magnitude 1.6 earthquake radiates roughly 3.7 kg of TNT equivalent in seismic energy.

The USGS assigns this earthquake a significance score of 39, which is below the USGS threshold of more than 600 for its significant-earthquake list. The ranking combines magnitude with available Did You Feel It responses and PAGER alert level; it is not a direct measurement of damage.

What the magnitude scale actually measures →

The epicentre was located at 40.7573, -111.5830 — 2 km east-northeast of Summit Park. The closest other recorded event was a magnitude 0.6 earthquake 5 km north of here on 15 July 2026.

At 11 km this was a shallow earthquake. Shallow events release their energy close to the surface, so for a given magnitude they produce noticeably stronger shaking — and more damage — than deeper ones. Roughly three quarters of all earthquakes worldwide occur at shallow depths.

This catalogue does not ingest eyewitness responses, so it cannot confirm where this earthquake was felt. Based on magnitude alone, events this small are usually detected by instruments rather than people. Its shallow focus makes stronger surface shaking more likely than for a deeper event of the same magnitude.

Read more on how focal depth changes what you feel →

The USGS record does not carry a link to NOAA tsunami information. That field is not an all-clear and does not state whether a tsunami occurred. In this case, a damaging tsunami would be less likely because at M1.6 it falls below the magnitude 6.5 threshold that generally applies before a submarine earthquake displaces enough water to generate a damaging tsunami; it occurred inland rather than beneath the sea floor. For an active coastal alert, use tsunami.gov or your local warning authority.

How earthquakes generate tsunamis, and what the alert levels mean →

1 further earthquakes have been recorded within about 150 km of the epicentre in the seven days after this event, the largest of them magnitude 0.7.

3 earthquakes of magnitude 4 or above have been logged within roughly 200 km of this epicentre in our catalogue. The strongest was a magnitude 4.7 event near Evanston on 22 January 2026. This M1.6 event released about 38,905 times less energy than that event.

How long aftershock sequences last, and how large they get →

This earthquake is part of the July 2026 worldwide record. Browse the full monthly archive to compare periods.