Early Tuesday morning an unusual earthquake roused sleeping Southerners from their slumber.

Recorded at a magnitude of 4.9, the quake was of an unusually high magnitude for an area nowhere near any major fault lines. While the epicenter of the quake was about 37 miles southwest of Chattanooga, people from Mississippi to North Carolina were awakened by the shakin’.

Richard Allen, assistant professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Wisconsin, said this sort of geological activity was very out of the ordinary for that region.

“The regions where we commonly expect to have earthquakes are the areas along plate boundaries. Most of the West Coast of the United States runs right along a plate boundary, and so that’s where we see the most earthquakes,” Allen said.

Allen said there are few fault lines in the eastern portion of the United States, which makes that region’s occasional earthquakes all the more surprising. The United States Geological Survey website shows clusters of seismic activity in an area to the northwest of Tuesday’s quake, but no tremors in Wisconsin.

“I would be very surprised if there was an earthquake in Wisconsin,” Allen said. “In fact, I’m certain the chances are slim, and that’s about as close as you’ll ever get to having a scientist offer a prediction about seismic activity.”

Almost all the scientific documentation of seismic activity in Wisconsin occurred from tremors felt from quakes in other areas, such as Lake Michigan or states as far away as South Carolina.

In November 2002, a violent earthquake in Alaska sent subtle waves of motion through the earth’s crust. Fairbanks, Alaska recorded a quake of 7.9-magnitude that shut down the trans-Alaska pipeline and cracked highways. The Alaska quake vibrated bedrock in Wisconsin, stirring up sediment that had been lying at the bottom of the water table, giving many residents muddy well water.

Allen said he spoke to quite a few reporters covering the bizarre occurrence of the well-water shakeup.

“The ground motion association with the earthquake in Alaska was large because it was an earthquake of a very high magnitude,” Allen said.

Tim Long, professor of geophysics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said that he felt the quake at his home in Atlanta.

“It was five in the morning, so we were all asleep. The pet dog woke us up, and the ground and house vibrated for probably 10 seconds. I was probably only awake for five seconds of it,” Long said.

Long said the tremors his family felt were not violent or long-lasting enough to send families running for cover in doorways.

“At the point where we experienced the earthquake in Atlanta, the severity had been downgraded to a two or a three, which is really about a vibration that would correspond with a truck passing by,” Long said.

At a 4.9 magnitude, the Tuesday morning quake was strong enough at its epicenter to crack plaster ceilings and walks and dishevel brick chimneys. Allen said it was important to keep in mind earthquake severity increases ten-fold for every magnitude point.

Long said that emergency plans for earthquakes were probably not something on the mind of the typical Southerner.

“Certainly in this area it’s not something that is taught regularly, it’s not reinforced. Something like this has to be reinforced about every six months, otherwise it doesn’t sink in. In Southern California, where they have small earthquakes fairly regularly, there’s incentive for people to learn safety precautions,” Long said.