Small offshore earthquakes under Santa Monica Bay shake parts of Southern California

HERMOSA BEACH, Calif. – HERMOSA BEACH, Calif. (AP) — Small earthquakes under Santa Monica Bay shook parts of Southern California on Monday.

By evening, the largest had been a magnitude-3.7 tremor at 4:59 p.m. and a magnitude-3.5 at 2:17 a.m., centered a few miles west of the Los Angeles suburb of Hermosa Beach, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

A USGS website for citizen reports of quake intensity showed the larger quakes were felt in an arc from northwest of Los Angeles down to southern Orange County.

Christopher Knight, a Scottsdale, Ariz., resident visiting in Marina del Rey, said the early morning jolt lasted about a second. "It was very short shift from left to right."

Quakes of such magnitude generally do not cause harm.