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    A moderate 6.3 earthquake roused rural Nevadans out of there beds Thursday morning but apparently caused little damage.

    According to the U.S. Geological Survey the 6.3-magnitude earthquake hit northeast Nevada oat about 6:16 a.m Pacifica Time 7:16 Mountain Time. The quake had an epicenter of only 3.7 miles and struck in a sparsely populated area 11 miles southeast of Wells near the Nevada-Utah line.

    There are no immediate reports of injuries.

    Elko County Undersheriff Rocky Gonzalez said there are unconfirmed reports of some damage to buildings.

The quake was felt across eastern Nevada, Utah and as far away as Southern California. There were reports of buildings swaying in downtown Salt Lake City, which is about 230 miles from Elko.

    While not known for quakes, eastern Nevadans are not strangers to them. It was almost a year ago that a smaller tremors also with an epicenter located in Wells hit the area.

    The 2007 quake originally measure 4.1 on the Richter scale but was later down graded to 3.7, the strongest after shock came less than three hours later measuring 3.1 on the Richter scale.

    Developed in 1935 by Charles Richter in collaboration with Beno Gutenberg, both of the California Institute of Technology, the scale was originally intended to be used only in a particular study area in California, and on seismograms recorded on a particular instrument, the Wood-Anderson torsion seismometer. Richter originally reported values to the nearest quarter of a unit, but decimal numbers were used later. His motivation for creating the local magnitude scale was to separate the vastly larger number of smaller earthquakes from the few larger earthquakes observed in California at the time. His inspiration for the technique was the stellar magnitude scale used in astronomy to describe the brightness of stars and other celestial objects. Richter arbitrarily chose a magnitude 0 event to be an earthquake that would show a maximum combined horizontal displacement of 1 micrometer on a seismogram recorded using a Wood-Anderson torsion seismometer 100 km from the earthquake epicenter. This choice was intended to prevent negative magnitudes from being assigned. However, the Richter scale has no upper or lower limit, and sensitive modern seismographs now routinely record quakes with negative magnitudes.

    Thursday's quake was classified as "moderate" the 2007 Wells earthquake was classified as “minor”. Previously last recorded earth quake to hit Wells happened in 1991.

    According to University of Nevada- Reno Seismologist Diane de Polo, the federal government has only very recently begun to monitor seismic activity for Western Nevada.

    “We have very good records and recording devices for the western part of the state,” she said in an interview last year. “But quite frankly we simply do not know a whole lot about rural Nevada. We do know there are several faults all capable of creating a major earthquake in eastern Nevada we just don’t know there history.”

   Two years the federal government began an experimental program to put temporary seismograph all over the country including ironically Geoff Dahl’s ranch.

    "A guy came out about two years ago and got real excited,” said Rancher Geof Dahl said in 2007. “He said my house was right over a major fault line. About two years ago they put out a monitor."

    The monitor on Dahl’s ranch is part of project EarthScope array of seismograph the now cover all western states from the Rocky Mountains east.

    “Anywhere there is a mountain range in eastern Nevada there is a fault line running at the base of it,” de Polo explained. “With the new array we can get a better idea of the seismic activity in the region.”