At a Glance

The quake Wednesday was centered between Chattanooga and Knoxville.The tremor was felt in the Atlanta metro area, as well as parts of the Tennessee Valley.

An early-morning earthquake in East Tennesseewas widely felt across the Southeast on Wednesday.

The magnitude 4.4 quake struck around 4:14 a.m. EST, centered about 7 miles north-northeast of Decatur, Tennessee, in Meigs County, about 55 miles west-southwest of Knoxville.

It was followed about 12 minutes later by a magnitude 3.3 aftershock.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, over most of the Atlanta metro area, and a number of states from southern Alabama to South Carolina, North Carolina, and Kentucky.

There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.

This quake was one of the strongest on record in east Tennessee, exceeded only by a Nov. 30, 1973tremor near Maryville, south of Knoxville, which led to minor damage near the epicenter.

The quake appeared to occur along the , a southwest-to-northeast belt extending from Alabama to far southwestern Virginia that is the second-most-active quake zone in the central and eastern United States behind the more notorious New Madrid zone.

A 2014 USGS study bumped a of earthquakes, though not nearly as high as the New Madrid zone in the western part of Tennessee and other adjacent states.

Though quakes stronger than M4.7 have not been recorded in recent times, a in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America found evidence of a magnitude 6 or stronger temblor along the ETSZ within the last 25,000 years.

Earthquakes in the central and eastern U.S. can be felt over an area more than 10 times larger than a similar magnitude quake in the West, according to the USGS.