LOS ANGELES -- A magnitude-3.2 quake hit Beverly Hills, Calif., before dawn on Monday, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. There were no immediate reports of damage.

Beverly Hills police watch commander Sgt. Michael Publicker said his station got numerous calls from anxious citizens after the 3:26 a.m. PT (6:26 a.m. ET) quake.

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"Every alarm in the city is going off," he said. Patrol officers had seen no signs of structural damage, Publicker added.

California’s earthquake 'swarm' unusual but not rare

An officer at the nearby West Los Angeles police precinct said there had been no calls about the quake. 

The U.S.G.S. reported that the epicenter was one mile from West Hollywood and eight miles from Los Angeles Civic Center, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

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Updated at 11:58 p.m. ET: A rash of up to 70 moderate earthquakes rattled Southern California on Sunday, shaking an area from rural Imperial County to the San Diego coast and north into the Coachella Valley.

According to the USGS, the largest quake was 5.5-magnitude that rattled Brawley, Calif., small Imperial County farming town, just before 2 p.m.

A 5.3 magnitude quake struck at 12:31 p.m. about three miles north-northwest of Brawley, according to Paul Caruso, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey. It was followed minutes later by a 4.9 magnitude quake.

The epicenters of the bigger earthquakes were 11 to 12 miles from Imperial, Calif., and 15 to 16 miles from El Centro, Calif., the USGS reported.

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Read the story at NBC 7 San Diego

Several glasses and a bottle of wine crashed to the floor and shattered at Assaggio, an Italian restaurant in Brawley, said owner Jerry Ma. The shaking was short-lived but intense, he said.   

"It felt like there was quake every 15 minutes. One after another. My kids are small and they're scared and don't want to come back inside," said Mike Patel, who manages Townhouse Inn & Suites in Brawley. A TV came crashing down and a few light fixtures broke inside the motel, Patel said.   

A Brawley Police Department dispatcher said several downtown buildings sustained minor damage. No injuries were reported.

The USGS said more than 100 aftershocks struck the same approximate epicenter, about 16 miles north of El Centro. Some shaking was felt along the San Diego County coast in Del Mar, some 120 miles from the epicenter, as well as in the Coachella Valley, southern Orange County and parts of northern Mexico.

Some shaking was felt on the coast in Del Mar, some 120 miles from the epicenter, as well as in southern Orange County and parts of northern Mexico.

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The quakes pushed 20 mobile homes at a trailer park off their foundations, displacing the families that lived in them, said Maria Peinado, a spokeswoman for the Imperial County Emergency Operations Center.

Sporadic power outages affecting 2,500 Imperial Irrigation District customers also prompted authorities to evacuate some patients from one of the county's two hospitals.

No injuries were reported.

Residents across San Diego County reported feeling the quakes in places including downtown San Diego, Mission Valley, Santee and Chula Vista. No injuries were reported.

San Diego State University geology expert Pat Abbott told NBC 7 San Diego that Sunday’s earthquakes were in the middle of the Brawley Seismic Zone, famous for swarms of quakes. He said he expected aftershocks.

“[The Brawley Seismic Zone] is a broad zone with lots of little faults,” Abbott explained.

“This area has clearly activated. We will likely experience swarms of 3, 4 and 5-magnitude [earthquakes] but they are not likely to increase in intensity. Of course, there are no guarantees on this, but history says they likely won’t get bigger – that we will experience more of the same or smaller quakes,” he added. 

NBCSanDiego.com and The Associated Press contributed to this story.

Updated at 3:07 p.m. ET: A moderate earthquake rattled Southern California on Saturday morning, shaking homes across the Inland Empire region and causing buildings to sway in Los Angeles. There were no reports of injuries or serious damage.

The quake, initially reported at magnitude 4.1, was later downgraded to 3.8. It was centered along the San Andreas Fault about two miles northwest of Devore, in San Bernadino County, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. It struck at 8:07 a.m. at a depth of more than six miles.

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"I was just sitting in my old chair when the house started shaking," Frank Chavez of Crestline, a mountain town just east of the epicenter, told The Associated Press. "I looked at my wife and we both said, 'earthquake!'. It was no big deal. These get to be old hat if you live in California awhile."

A San Bernardino County Sheriff's dispatcher in nearby Rancho Cucamonga said the station shook for a few seconds, but there were no calls about damage or injuries, the AP reported.

Buildings swayed in downtown Los Angeles, about 60 miles to the west, according to local media reports.

The USGS said it didn't expect any serious damage from the quake.

NBC4’s Facebook page lit up with reactions from people throughout Southern California who said they felt the quake.

Desiree Carroll said she thought a truck went off the 57 Freeway and hit her house in Diamond Bar.

Pat Gowder said he heard the rumble rather than felt it. “Sounded like my house was sliding but didn't feel movement. I live in Glendora,” Gowder wrote.

Michael V. Muñoz wrote, “Oh Ok! So it wasn't just me feeling like I was going to passout after my run this morning!”

The Associated Press and NBCLosAngeles.com contributed to this story.

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A volleyball and soccer ball that washed ashore on an Alaskan island may be the first pieces of debris to arrive in the United States from last year's tsunami in Japan.

The sports balls were spotted by radar technician David Baxter on treeless, windswept Middleton Island in the Gulf of Alaska, Doug Helton of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle said in an agency blog post.

Baxter’s wife translated writing on the soccer ball and traced it back to a Japanese school in an area hit by the tsunami, Helton said.

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He told the Anchorage Daily News the balls were the first tsunami debris retrieved in Alaska.

 

"There have been other items that were suspected, but this is the first one that we're aware of that has the credentials that may make it possible to positively identify it."

Helton, in the NOAA post, said the agency, the State Department and the Japanese Embassy and its Seattle consulate are working to confirm details and set up the return of other debris that comes ashore.

A magnitude 9.0 earthquake off Japan's northeast coast on March 11, 2011, triggered a 75-foot wall of water that flattened waterfront towns, killing 16,000. Three thousand people are still unaccounted for. The tsunami triggered a crisis at Tokyo Electric Power's Fukushima Daiichi atomic power plant, forcing tens of thousands of people to flee in the world's worst nuclear accident in 25 years.

U.S. authorities were immediately aware that the clockwise circulation of the Pacific's northern waters would deliver some remnants of that destruction to American shores.

A Japanese ghost ship Ryou-Un Maru turned up earlier in the Gulf of Alaska off Southeast Alaska after a 4,500-mile journey. The U.S. Coast Guard ended sank the vessel April 5.

In January, a half-dozen large buoys suspected to be from Japanese oyster farms appeared at the top of Alaska's panhandle and may be among the first tsunami debris.

State health and environmental officials have said there's little need to be worried that debris landing on Alaska shores will be contaminated by radiation.

This article contains reporting by Reuters and The Associated Press.

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When the town of Clintonville, Wis., declared that mysterious booms scaring residents were tied to small tremors, they didn't convince everyone -- not even every quake scientist. So to be sure, they had the sound analyzed (click to hear it) and brought in seismic sensors.

Moreover, what with all the media attention, they've even decided to make the most of their celebrity moment by selling "I Survived the 1.5" (as in earthquake magnitude) T-shirts.

So what are the sensors showing?

"We did record an earthquake Thursday night," Greg Waite, a Michigan Technological University geologist told msnbc.com on Monday. "It was very small, less than magnitude 0.5," he said, but "there were several calls to the authorities in Clintonville at about that time reporting booming sounds."

City Administrator Lisa Kuss told msnbc.com that residents continue to be concerned "because we keep having smaller events."

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On March 22, Kuss declared "the mystery is solved" after the U.S. Geological Survey detected a 1.5-magnitude tremor at 12:16 a.m. on March 20 in Clintonville, population 4,500.

"In other places in the United States, a 1.5 earthquake would not be felt," she said a town meeting. "But the type of rock Wisconsin has transmits seismic energy very well."

Listen to audio of a March 24 'boom'
Town map of where booms were reported heard

Some residents refuse to believe the booms are from the 1.5-magnitude quake and smaller tremors, and they have some scientific support.

Paul Caruso, a USGS scientist, noted that while earthquakes can trigger an underground sonic boom, he didn't think the recent quake was large enough to do that.

"To be honest, I'm skeptical that there'd be a sound report associated with such a small earthquake, but it's possible," he told The Associated said shortly after the March 20 quake was detected.

Last Thursday, four seismometers and four infrasound sensors were installed to see if the sounds can be tied definitively to tremors.

"The USGS will issue authoritative earthquake location and magnitude information for all future earthquakes," Waite said. "If the swarm continues, I hope to be able to say something about why they are occurring and how they are generating audible sound."

Clintonville, for its part, hopes to make a little "civic improvement" cash out of its saga. Kuss estimated that by Monday morning some 500 T-shirts had been ordered, some even from out of state. The town clears about $5 a shirt.

"The profits from these shirts will be used to beautify or enhance something in our City as determined by the Mayor at a later date," the town says on its website. "This is not meant to make light of a serious situation but to show that we, as a community, came together to get through the events."

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CLINTONVILLE, Wis. -- Did a minor earthquake cause the booming sounds plaguing an eastern Wisconsin city this week? Yes, the city administrator said at a news conference Thursday evening. Not so fast, a federal geophysicist said.

The U.S. Geological Survey did say that a 1.5 magnitude earthquake struck Tuesday just after midnight in Clintonville, a town of about 4,600 people about 40 miles west of Green Bay.

Geophysicist Paul Caruso told The Associated Press that loud booming noises have been known to accompany earthquakes. It's possible the mysterious sounds that town officials have been investigating are linked to the quake, he said.

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Earthquakes can generate seismic energy that moves through rock at thousands of miles per hour, producing a sonic boom when the waves come to the earth's surface, Caruso said.

 

"To be honest, I'm skeptical that there'd be a sound report associated with such a small earthquake, but it's possible," he said.

Those reservations didn't stop Clintonville City Administrator Lisa Kuss from declaring "the mystery is solved" at a news conference Thursday evening.

She said USGS representatives described the event as a swarm of several small earthquakes in a very short time.

"In other places in the United States, a 1.5 earthquake would not be felt," she said. "But the type of rock Wisconsin has transmits seismic energy very well."

The U.S. Geological Survey says earthquakes with magnitude of 2.0 or less aren't commonly felt by people and are generally recorded only on local seismographs. Caruso said the Tuesday earthquake was discovered after people reported feeling something, and geologists pored through their data to determine that an earthquake did indeed strike.

Local residents have reported late-night disturbances since Sunday, including a shaking ground and loud booms that sound like thunder or fireworks. The booming continued Monday and Tuesday nights and into Wednesday morning, eventually prompting Jolene Van Beek to take her three sons to her father's home, 10 minutes away, so they could get some uninterrupted sleep.

 

"My husband thought it was cool, but I don't think so. This is not a joke," said Van Beek. "I don't know what it is, but I just want it to stop."

City officials investigated and ruled out a number of human-related explanations, such as construction, traffic, military exercises and underground work. They checked water, sewer and gas lines, contacted the military about any exercises in the area, reviewed permits for mining explosives and inspected a dam next to City Hall. They even tested methane levels at the landfill in case the gas was spontaneously exploding.

Clintonville resident Jordan Pfeiler, 21, said she doubted an earthquake caused the noises. She said the booms she experienced were in a series over the course of several hours and not continuous as she might have expected if they were caused by an earthquake.

Still, she said, "It's a little scary knowing Clintonville could even have earthquakes."

Steve Dutch, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, said a 1.5 magnitude earthquake produces the energy equivalent of 100 pounds of explosives and could certainly produce loud sounds.

But he was reluctant to describe Tuesday's event as an earthquake, saying the term is generally used to refer to widespread stress in the earth's crust. What happened in Wisconsin could be near the surface, perhaps caused by groundwater movement or thermal expansion of underground pipes, he said.

Still, Dutch said it was possible that the event could produce a series of sounds over time.

Professor: Groundwater could be causing booms

Earlier, Kuss told The Green Bay Press Gazette that the city was spending $7,000 to hire an engineering firm in Waukesha, Wis., to install ground seismology monitors in four places around Clintonville late Thursday or early Friday.

Some residents are having fun with the mystery, which has drawn media attention from around the nation.

Jordan Pfeiler said people stayed up late on the first two nights to walk around listening for booms. They came up with outlandish theories to explain the noise - for example, that the White House was building an underground bunker in the area or that mole men had found a home there.

"And the aliens, of course, there's always the aliens," she said.

 The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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A massive earthquake like the one that unleashed a giant tsunami and killed nearly 16,000 people in Japan a year ago not only could happen here in the U.S., but probably will — and relatively soon in terms of seismological history.

The Tohoku earthquake was the most closely monitored in history, yielding an unprecedented breadth of data, geophysicists and seismologists say. And for residents of the Pacific Northwest, the new data should be worrisome.

"It's just like Japan, only a mirror image," said Gerard Fryer, a geophysicist at the University of Hawaii and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.

The disaster in Japan occurred because of stress from the Pacific tectonic plate sliding below Japan, according to new research discussed last month at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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The lead researcher, John Anderson, a geophysicist at the University of Nevada-Reno, said the plates locked together, slowly pushing Japan westward.

The plates released catastrophically on March 11, 2011, creating a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami waves that topped 100 feet, said Anderson, who spent most of the past year in Japan as a visiting research professor in Tokyo.

While most Americans probably think the San Andreas fault running through California poses the greatest threat of unleashing a killer mega-quake, data from the Japanese quake indicate that the distinction actually belongs to the Cascadia fault line, which runs through southern Canada, Washington and Oregon to Northern California, Anderson said at the conference.

USGS earthquake information by state

Like Fryer, he called the Pacific Northwest trench a "mirror image" of the Japanese trench — except potentially even more dangerous.

"In this mirror image, one can see that if the same earthquake occurred in Cascadia, the fault would rupture to a significant distance inland, since the Cascadia trench sits much closer to the coastline than the trench off the coast of Japan," Anderson said.

While some probability models predict that a Cascadia earthquake wouldn't rupture so far under the land, "if it does, the data from the Tohoku earthquake predict stronger ground motions along our West Coast than those seen in Japan," he said.

In layman's terms, what's happening is that the region "is being deformed because the plates are locked together, and the shoreline is sinking and the rest of the thing is being bent," Fryer said in an interview with NBC station KHNL of Honolulu.

Fryer said the big question is not whether a Japan-like quake will happen, but when.

"Where are we here? Are we close or are we not close?" he asked. "I think the suspicion is that it could be sooner rather than later."

Anderson's research supports that conclusion.

Experts generally agree that last great Cascadia earthquake happened on Jan. 26, 1700. It generated tsunami waves that indicated that its magnitude was also about 9.0.

"Earthquakes of this size in the past may have recurred with intervals of as small as about 300 years," Anderson said at the AAAS conference last month. "So it would not be a scientific surprise if such an event were to occur in the near future. If you live in the Pacific Northwest, look at the videos of Tohoku as a reminder to be prepared."

The warnings come as the White House is proposing a 2013 budget that would cut $4.6 million from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's tsunami programs. Much of that would come from the National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program, which funds evacuation maps, training and education efforts — important services given how deeply the Japanese quake and tsunami transformed the science of seismology.

"The Japan earthquake told us that a lot of what we understand about how earthquakes work is wrong," Fryer said. "Do we now have to go back and look at all of our evacuation maps and make sure that they're right? That's a question that's still unanswered, and that question would be answered with tsunami hazard mitigation program funds."

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Back-to-back earthquakes rattled northern California Monday morning, triggering an early start to the work week for some in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area.

The stronger quake -- at a 4.0 magnitude -- was centered one mile north of El Cerrito in the East Bay and 10 miles north-northwest of Oakland. It struck at a depth of 5.7 miles at 5:33 a.m. PT, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It came about seven seconds after a 3.5 temblor -- known as the foreshock -- hit in nearly the same location at a depth of five miles.

"There were two earthquakes … and since then there have been a lot of little aftershocks, which is totally to be expected, down in the magnitude 2.0 range,” Don Blakeman, a geophysicist at the USGS' National Earthquake Information Center in Colorado, told msnbc.com.

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The USGS website initially appeared to show two quakes, then one temblor in the immediate aftermath -- and some people wrote on Twitter that they felt two.

"It’s always difficult to split quakes this close together," Blakeman said, noting that automatic systems first upload the information, which quake analysts then have to review.

“I think part of the interest today is the fact that it’s been a little while since we had even a 4.0 in the Bay Area," he noted. "I think (it) kind of reminded everybody that California still has earthquakes.”

No damage was reported, the California Highway Patrol's Central Division said on Twitter. Blakeman said they haven't had any direct reports of damage.

"For a magnitude 4.0 quake we’ll probably get some reports of things falling off of people shelves and ... maybe a window cracked here and there, something like that, but shouldn’t be anything major,” he said.

Christine Cosgrove, who lives in Berkeley -- about four miles north of the epicenter, told the San Francisco Chronicle that "a big chunk of our chimney fell down. For us, this was the strongest earthquake we've felt in 22 years in the house. Other items fell off window sills and broke."

The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) stopped all trains where they were for at least five minutes as part of standard procedure, said communications director Jim Allison. A later inspection of the 104 miles of track did not turn up any problems, he added.

The shaking sent many to Twitter to comment on the small tremors:

"Here in Mill Valley, heard rumble of quake 1, then a second later, the hard hit of quake 2. Both were sharp pops with little after-roll," wrote Stephen Bové.

"(W)orked better than coffee 5:45am," quipped Maritza Ruiz-Kim.

"My shaky wake up call seemed to last for 30 sec+," said Amanda Walter.

"Was in airport shuttle during the quake. But now everyone else in SF is awake obscenely early, too!" exclaimed Zoelle Egner.‏ 

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