A series of earthquakes off the coast of Matata have been felt across the Bay of Plenty this afternoon, although GNS scientist Steve Sherwood thinks only a few of the seven to 10 quakes have been felt.

The series of earthquakes are centred a few kilometres off the Matata coast, with a series of shallow weak earthquakes beginning this morning and continuing this afternoon.

Steve says the earthquakes are not particularly unusual.

'There are hundreds of faults running through the central North Island in a north easterly direction and there is a number of them running through the Bay of Plenty lowlands there, and out into the sea, heading off in the general White Island direction,” he says.

It is probably movement of one of those faults that has produced theses earthquakes this afternoon.

'A colleague asked ‘Do you think it's a swarm?' and I replied ‘It's too soon to tell',” says Steve.

'We‘ve only had a few. You can give them a label like that once it's gone on for longer. It's too soon to tell between 10 or so earthquakes we have recorded.”

The biggest of the earthquakes was magnitude 4.1 and was felt from Whakatane to Tauranga and south as far as Kawerau, but it was felt as a light earthquake.

'There have been half a dozen, about 10. I would imagine only perhaps the largest three or four would have been felt,” says Steve.

The small earthquakes are comparatively shallow, being about 8-9 km deep. The 4.1at 1.35pm was only four km beneath the seabed.