U.S. experts expect no major earthquakes in San Francisco following smaller tremor

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 4 (Xinhua) -- U.S. experts said Thursday that no major earthquakes are expected after a magnitude 4.4 tremor jolted San Francisco Bay Area, northern California earlier in the day.

The earthquake, with a depth of 12 kilometers near Berkeley north of San Francisco on the U.S. western coast, struck the Bay Area at 2:39 a.m. local time (10:39 GMT) and was widely felt throughout the area.

Randy Baldwin, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), told a local TV station that a magnitude 4.4 earthquake is a common size for the area.

"There will likely be aftershocks. There's a small probability there will be bigger ones," said Keith Knudsen, deputy director of the USGS Earthquake Science Center.

The San Francisco Emergency Operations Center (EOC) tweeted earlier that it is conducting an assessment of city facilities and infrastructure.

"There are no reports of damage or injuries at this time," EOC said in a twitter post.

According to an earthquake monitoring website, earthquaketrack.com, a total of 37 tremors with a magnitude less than 4.5 were reported in the past month and more tha 380 earthquakes of similar magnitude have occurred in the past 365 days in the San Francisco Bay Area. Enditem