Early Friday morning in Alexandria, Minnesota, neighbors had a shakey awakening.

An earthquake rattled part of the city causing no injuries but leaving some Minnesotans wondering if it could happen anywhere else.

"I have never heard of an earthquake happening in the Midwest," one Duluth woman said leaving the grocery store.

"Yeah, it would be weird."

But, at 2:30 a.m. it happened the U.S. Geological Survey said. The magnitude reading was a 2.5 in Alexandria where worried phone calls poured into authorities.

"Several of them thought that their furnaces had exploded and they just wanted to find out if we knew anything about it," Douglas County Sheriff Brad Brejcha said.

With no injuries or damages reported, the only evidence, outside of seismograph reading, were shaken people and pets.

"Dogs were going nuts and were barking all over neighborhoods," Brejcha said.

Nigel Wattrus, an Associate Professor of Geology at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, said the magnitude of the earthquake made it barely noticeable.

"You have to be in exactly the right location and be basically looking for the event to even realize that it had happened," Wattrus said.

Scientists say Alexandria lies on an old suture where two types of geologic terrain meet. That doesn't exist in the Duluth area. But, it's nothing compared to active areas near japan.

"Any kind of earthquake activity that we see here is literally residual stress which is working its way out of the system," Wattrus said.

"Sitting here in the Midwest we're about as far away from a plate boundary as you can possibly be."

The largest earthquake recorded in Minnesota was magnitude 4.6 near Morris in 1975.