M2.3 Earthquake near Norabats’, Armenia — 12 March 2025

Minor earthquakes in this range are felt by people close to the epicentre as a brief jolt or rattle, but they very rarely cause any damage.

A magnitude 2.3 earthquake radiates roughly 43 kg of TNT equivalent in seismic energy.

The USGS assigns this earthquake a significance score of 82, 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 16:08 local solar time at the epicentre, during the afternoon.

This event was deeper than 67% of the 3 earthquakes recorded in Armenia in our catalogue and stronger than 33% of them.

The epicentre was located at 40.1210, 44.4967 — 5 km east-northeast of Norabats’. The closest other recorded event was a magnitude 4.4 earthquake 91 km north-northwest of here on 08 March 2025.

The nearest other settlements in our records are Gogaran (91 km north-northwest), Amasia (120 km north-northwest), Kağızman (135 km west) and Susuz (157 km northwest).

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.

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 M2.3 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.

6 earthquakes of magnitude 4 or above have been logged within roughly 200 km of this epicentre in our catalogue. The strongest was a magnitude 5.1 event near Erciş on 04 April 2026. This M2.3 event released about 15,849 times less energy than that event.

1 earthquakes have been recorded within 100 km of this epicentre in the past year, 1 of them in the past 30 days.

This earthquake is part of the March 2025 worldwide record, and of earthquakes in Armenia during March 2025. Browse the full monthly archive to compare periods.