Experts said a suspected earthquake that rattled portions of South Carolina was actually a sonic boom of unknown origins.
The U.S. Geological Survey confirmed the incident just before 5:30 p.m. Thursday was not an earthquake, but a sonic boom estimated to have originated in the St. Andrews area before traveling across multiple counties, including the Columbia area and the Midlands.
The Geological Survey said its equipment is not calibrated to measure sonic booms, so the event was given a rating of 0.0.
The National Weather Service said staff noted the blast at Columbia Metropolitan Airport.
NASA officials said the boom does not appear to have originated from space.
“We have no eyewitness reports of a fireball and no satellite detections of a meteor over the area at the time,” Bill Cooke, lead for NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office, told WLTX-TV.
The American Meteor Society concurred that the origin of the boom was likely terrestrial.
Shaw Air Force Base said Friday morning that there were no activities at the base Thursday that would have caused the boom.
