LOS ANGELES - A minor earthquake shook the Los Angeles region early Wednesday but no damage was reported, authorities said.

The magnitude 3.7 quake occurred minutes after midnight and was centred in the area southwest of downtown, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The Los Angeles Fire Department conducted a citywide survey and found no damage, spokesman Nicholas Prange said.

The community reporting website operated by the USGS received about 17,000 reports characterizing the shaking from moderate to weak.

The quake occurred just to the east of the Inglewood Oil Field at a depth of 7.2 miles (11.6 kilometres).

“I’m happy to have slept thru last night’s little quake,“ veteran seismologist Lucy Jones tweeted.

She said the temblor appeared to have occurred on the Newport-Inglewood fault at almost the same locations as four magnitude 3 quakes in April, May and June 2015.

“Those and today are all deep ... way below the oil fields,“ said Jones, who is retired from the USGS but remains a researcher at the California Institute of Technology and has founded a centre aimed at making communities more resilient to natural disasters.