An earthquake swarm north of White Island overnight is looking less intense in the light of day, says GeoNet seismologist Brad Scott.

The series of four earthquakes between 8.56pm and 1.49am includes ‘ghost quakes' says Brad.

Some earthquakes recorded north of White Island may be ghosts.

The automated system has picked up echoes of distant earthquakes and interpreted them as local.

'There's been a couple of things going on,” says Brad. 'There's been a couple of magnitude 5, and 5.5 earthquakes up in Papua New Guinea and Fiji and they have come through overnight and our auto location system has misidentified them,” says Brad.

'They are what we call ghost earthquakes. Some of the earthquakes showing up there are the automatic system misinterpreting those large offshore earthquakes as local ones.”

Geonet's automated system records and posts the earthquakes overnight, and it's not until a human looks at them the following morning that the ghosts are deleted, says Brad.

'But there was a magnitude 4.4 north of Te Kaha at 8am, and there's been a couple of aftershocks related to that. So that was a real earthquake on our patch.

'Up off East Cape is a pretty common place to have moderate earthquakes.”