If you didn’t grow up in an earthquake-prone area, let me tell you, big earthquakes are terrifying and devastating.
Tiny earthquakes, though? They are what you talk about at school and work. (“Did you feel it?”) If you didn’t, you feel left out. Small earthquake FOMO is real.
Whenever I feel one, I always try to find the earliest social mention by somebody close to the epicenter and look at the timestamp in order to confirm the seismic wave propagation speed
i experienced a very small one in pittsburgh years ago and i couldn’t believe how…smooth it felt? still really scary for me but when it was over i was like … huh!
I remember one little on, 3 or 4 maybe, and it jolted the bed so hard my wife woke up and yelled at me for moving furniture
I thought a truck hit the house
I love earthquakes. I have a little game I play every time I feel one. Based on the time between the initial shock (p-wave) and the rumblings that follow (s-waves), as well as the direction of their movement, I try to guess the size, distance and location before it appears on the USGS site.
I've gotten pretty good at it, and it's a fun way of taking the edge off a potentially dangerous situation.
It helps that I studied geology in college and live in the fault-ridden Bay Area. 🤓
The evening after the Loma Prieta quake I was talking to my parents on the phone when an aftershock came through… I was in the south bay, they were in the north so it took a noticeable delay before they felt it!
How cool! It's like an analog version of this type of video:
ds.iris.edu/spud/gmv/179...
Incidentally, I'm forever sad that I basically missed Loma Prieta, despite being here at the time. My mom was driving me home from basketball practice, so it just felt like she was driving weird for a moment.
It happened the Tuesday before I got married to my late wife, a lot of my relatives were already in town… they had STORIES to tell when they went home. Almost everyone made it to the wedding, we were just glad my parents had phoned the restaurant in Oakland instead of driving there the day of!
When I lived in Oakland, I did the same thing! Would usually announce my guess to my spouse and then look it up on the USGS site to see how I did. Many times, I could guess the size and general direction pretty easily. But I can't say I miss them now.
Guessing general direction! I have seen one quake's movement coming toward me (Loma Prieta) but otherwise don't get vector. Wondering what spidey-sense lets you intuit this.
I seem to be very sensitive to differences in movement across my body and I think it's related to whatever it is that makes me very susceptible to motion sickness.
Like, maybe an inner-ear/proprioception mismatch? 🤷♂️
Whatever it is, it's both a blessing and a curse, but mostly just a curse.
Sometimes sound approaching, sometimes visual (trees and/or ground movement). I lived very close to the Hayward fault, which generally runs along Highway 13.
My old apartment was a soft story building on liquifaction soil and I could guess the size and location of almost any earthquake with surprising accuracy as long as it originated east of SF - now I live on a hill and barely ever feel them and can't guess at all when I do!
There's a very LA scene in the show "Cybill" from the 90s where the two main characters are having a glass of wine when the table starts to shake. They both pick up their wine until the shaking stops, then look at each other and agree it was about 3.2 before putting their wine back down. Hilarious!
People do that irl though! My first in CA was middle of the night, I woke up feeling like the boat had just been rocked, "but wait, we're not in a boat" and my CA native partner barely woke up, said "4.2" and fell back asleep. Showed me the earthquake.usgs.gov "did you feel it" page next day 👍
I felt a 4.3 in Asheville, NC years ago, but didn’t realize it was an earthquake until the next morning. Last year we were in a 6.8 in Ecuador and WOW what a difference. Woke up the other night in a 5.3 and went right back to sleep.
I'm sure there must be some kind of reason we measure earthquakes logarithmically, but I feel like we should have some better way to say "this earthquake is 100x times stronger than '6 vs 4'"
They can vary so much that it’s the only way to say it without tacking a whooooole lot of digits on the scale. Imagine if we had .01-1,000 as the scale, etc
Hurricane’s get the same treatment iirc
hurricanes don't, categories increase according to wind speed and it's roughly linear. a good parallel to earthquake magnitude is decibels for loudness--a sound that is 60dB is ten times louder than one that's 50dB
And even at the same scale, there are different flavors of earthquakes. There’s one I felt about a decade ago that wasn’t that powerful but initially gave a jolt like something had hit the building before switching to mild vibration! It was scary until I realized what it was.
I used to work across the street from SF's Moscone Center, during years of construction.
Our usual office discussion was "Earthquake? Or just a big truck or something constructiony?"
Once experienced, you are ATTUNED.
At least, I was... I don't want to believe it was a hallucination, but there was one time in Belgium when I could have *sworn* there was a tremor, just a tiny one.
(I really couldn't find any central website I could check though, alas.)
I'm in Anchorage on the 3rd floor of a 4-story building right on a street a fair amount of cargo trucks use (and cops too, but that's another story), and it always feels like a small earthquake. I don't care for it AT ALL, but I recognize it's probably good, actually. We did fine in 2018.
iont have a framework at all so the one that hit nyc i was "whys the building shaking? thats stupid" then it stopped and i was like "thats BETTER" but it aint really occur to me to try to figure out like..."should that happen?"
I guess it would be as commonplace as a nighttime thunderstorm in that region, or a big snowstorm. Something that would just be everyday conversation, maybe even something you grew up and might even have nostalgic feelings about
I've never been further west than Ohio my whole life, so it would definitely be a unique experience for me if I ever went there
For anyone who grew up and lived a long time in the region, it would get to the point where you take it for granted, maybe
Those few seconds of a small earthquake where you're starting to think it might be turning into a big one and then it doesn't, whew. "Uh should I be getting up off the couch? ....No, okay"
