M1.8 Earthquake near Sulaymaniyah, Iraq — 15 December 2024

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

A magnitude 1.8 earthquake radiates roughly 7.6 kg of TNT equivalent in seismic energy.

The USGS assigns this earthquake a significance score of 50, 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.

That is about 03:02 local solar time at the epicentre, in the early hours of the morning.

This event was shallower than 100% of the 5 earthquakes recorded in Iraq in our catalogue and stronger than 20% of them.

The epicentre was located at 35.5469, 45.5007 — 6 km east-southeast of As Sulaymānīyah. The closest other recorded event was a magnitude 4.1 earthquake 86 km west of here on 31 July 2026.

The nearest other settlements in our records are Kirkuk (91 km west-southwest), Kermanshah (130 km south-southeast), Piranshahr (143 km north-northwest) and Javānrūd (144 km southeast).

At 10 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.

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 M1.8 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.

No further earthquakes have been recorded within about 150 km of the epicentre in the seven days after this event.

15 earthquakes of magnitude 4 or above have been logged within roughly 200 km of this epicentre in our catalogue. The strongest was a magnitude 5.2 event near Javānrūd on 20 July 2026. This M1.8 event released about 125,893 times less energy than that event.

No other earthquakes have been recorded within 100 km of this epicentre in the past year, which makes this a genuinely isolated event.

This earthquake is part of the December 2024 worldwide record, and of earthquakes in Iraq during December 2024. Browse the full monthly archive to compare periods.