earthquake
Last night I woke at 3:30am for no apparent reason. A few seconds after waking up, the house moved a bit, accompanied by a low rumble and the clicking/popping of lots of wood moving around in ways it hasn’t for quite a while.
Neat. Earthquake. Very, very minor earthquake, but the first ‘quake I have been concious for (I slept through quakes in Conecticutt and Missouri).
Out of curiosity, I pretty much immediately browsed the USGS recent earthquakes map for our area. The page had already been updated with the quake info. This was less than 5 minutes after the quake.
Pretty impressive.
It is interesting to note that the screenshot above shows 2 separate 3.x level events whereas the master site now shows a single 3.x level event (and some tiny aftershocks). The version info documents the ongoing analysis of the event. These links will take you to event specifics: foreshock and main event.
October 10th, 2006 at 7:08 pm
[...] Typically, when a seismic event occurs, the USGS site is updated extremely rapidly. Updates frequently occur within minutes of an event in CA. And the site reports events of extremely minor magnitude; often reporting magnitude 1.0 and 2.0 events caused by quarry explosions at the end of Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino. [...]
March 2nd, 2007 at 1:04 am
[...] Tally? 4 quakes since moving here nearly 4 years ago. One was a 3.4 basically directly under our house — woke me up. One was at Apple; just a bit of movement caused by a good sized quake south of us. One was at home; my wife had just gotten done with a rousing round of Dance Dance Revolution and stated that either she was having a heart attack or we were having an earthquake. Thankfully, it was another medium sized quake south of us. And now this one. [...]