M3.0 Earthquake near Elbert, United States — 17 October 2025, 18:51 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 3.0 earthquake radiates roughly 477 kg of TNT equivalent in seismic energy.

The USGS assigns this earthquake a significance score of 139, 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 11:52 local solar time at the epicentre, during the morning.

This event was deeper than 61% of the 156,239 earthquakes recorded in the United States in our catalogue and stronger than 96% of them.

The epicentre was located at 39.1286, -104.6400 — 13 km southwest of Elbert. The closest other recorded event was a magnitude 2.9 earthquake 105 km north-northwest of here on 13 June 2025.

The nearest other settlements in our records are Dacono (105 km north-northwest), Gilcrest (128 km north), Colorado City (140 km south) and Walsenburg (173 km south).

At 8 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, an event this size may be noticed locally, especially close to the epicentre. 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 M3.0 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.

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 3.0 event near Walsenburg on 18 May 2026. This M3.0 event released a comparable amount of energy to 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 October 2025 worldwide record, and of earthquakes in the United States during October 2025. Browse the full monthly archive to compare periods.