Monday, April 5, 2010

Our Easter earthquake Or "Why is our house rocking?"

We got to experience our first, and hopefully only, earthquake Sunday. Brian and I were hanging out at home, relaxing, and watching a movie. Our dog, Molly was sleeping on the floor next to me, when I felt the chair kind of rocking. I assumed Molly was stretching or scratching and hitting the chair. It went on long enough that I finally sat up to see what the heck she was doing only to see she was still sound asleep and not touching the chair at all. Then I noticed Brian was looking at me kind of strange and says, “Why is our house rocking?” The chandlers where rocking, the rod for the blinds where tapping the windows, it was kind of surreal. We thought the wind may have picked up, but it was still outside.
Of course we went next door to see if they felt anything and called a couple of friends. Everybody thought we where nuts.
I knew we had felt something, so, being a good geologist, I logged on to the U.S. Geological Survey website and started poking around. Sure enough, there had been a quake down in Baja California. At that time they said it had a 6.2 magnitude, which is big, but there had been bigger, closer earthquakes that we hadn’t noticed in the past. So I poked around some more.
The epicenter was 32km deep. Ah, there it is, that’s why the waves traveled so far. That’s a pretty deep earthquake and the deeper they are, the farther they tend to travel.
So I guess I get to cross this off the bucket list, not that experience any kind of earthquake was really high on my list of things to do.

2 comments:

MelissaSue said...

thats so crazy, glad thats all that you felt was just the house rocking and nothing else.
I've never experienced that

Many blessings to you

Creative Minds said...

That is so scary! Glad you guys are ok. Hopefully that will be the last earthquake you will feel.