M2.5 Earthquake near Selawik, United States — 20 March 2026, 16:34 UTC

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 2.5 earthquake radiates roughly 85 kg of TNT equivalent in seismic energy.

The USGS assigns this earthquake a significance score of 96, 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 05:54 local solar time at the epicentre, around dawn.

This event was deeper than 100% of the 156,299 earthquakes recorded in the United States in our catalogue and stronger than 92% of them.

The epicentre was located at 66.1360, -160.0160 — 52 km south of Selawik. The closest other recorded event was a magnitude 3.6 earthquake 120 km south-southwest of here on 25 August 2025.

The nearest other settlements in our records are Koyuk (120 km south-southwest), Noorvik (123 km north-northwest), Kiana (153 km north) and Noatak (165 km north-northwest).

At 599 km this was a deep-focus earthquake, occurring well inside the subducting slab rather than in the crust. Deep events are rarely damaging even at large magnitudes, though they can be felt over very long distances.

This catalogue does not ingest eyewitness responses, so it cannot confirm where this earthquake was felt. Based on magnitude alone, an event this size may be noticed locally, especially close to the epicentre. Its deep focus normally weakens surface shaking while spreading perceptible motion over a broad area.

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 M2.5 it falls below the magnitude 6.5 threshold that generally applies before a submarine earthquake displaces enough water to generate a damaging tsunami; its 599 km focal depth is too great to deform the sea floor significantly; 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.

0 earthquakes of magnitude 4 or above have been logged within roughly 200 km of this epicentre in our catalogue. The strongest was a magnitude 3.6 event near Koyuk on 25 August 2025. This M2.5 event released about 45 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 March 2026 worldwide record, and of earthquakes in the United States during March 2026. Browse the full monthly archive to compare periods.