Jan. 6—Yet another earthquake was recorded in the Madison area on Friday morning.

The United States Geological Survey reported a magnitude 2.6 earthquake at 3:47 a.m. on Friday. The epicenter of the earthquake was just under two miles east-southeast of Madison, located northwest of the Interstate 90 and County Line Road, in Lake County.

It is the second earthquake already in this year, with a magnitude 2.4 earthquake recorded north of Doty Road, west of the Ashtabula/Lake county line.

There have been a number of earthquakes in that area over the last year, the largest of which, a magnitude 3.6 earthquake centered near Cork Cold Springs Road in Harpersfield, was felt in Youngstown.

Thomas Pratt, Ph.D., a geophysicist with the USGS, said earthquakes in the eastern United States are a bit of a mystery.

“There’s all these little zones where we get concentrations of earthquakes, not a large number of earthquakes, they’re like the ones you have, but we really don’t know what the actual cause is for triggering these things,” he said.

Pratt said there are similar regions in New Hampshire and the Carolinas.

“We really don’t know what the actual cause is for triggering these things,” he said. “There’s presumably stress that’s been building up over the hundreds of millions of years in the crust, and this is releasing some of that [stress], but we don’t know why they’re being triggered where they are at any given time.”

Geologist do not know if the earthquakes are going to lead to something larger, but it is unlikely, Pratt said.

“We get a lot of little earthquakes like that around the eastern U.S., and very rarely have they ever led to something bigger, but we can’t say that won’t happen,” he said.