OK, I don’t actually believe in earthquake weather, but it was really hot today and the house just shook. (I could see the shaking as well as feel it.)
I’m going to check what others are reporting to the USGS. Be right back.
UPDATE: So far, it seems to be a magnitude 4 or so — a wee temblor. Here’s hoping letting off stress like this keeps the ginormous killer earthquakes at bay.
FriendFeed and Twitter are great – all the info was there within seconds of the earthquake. People-power!
I was sitting here wondering it that was an earthquake. I saw another blogger say it was one and I figured in couldn’t have been real big. KQED just reported it was in the east bay, Alamo, which explains why it wasn’t that big her in south SJ.
Blinking hot down here too… 102 freaking degrees…
I was first in my zip to report it- yes! Lasted about 3 secs here. Less strong than the last one.
A magnitude of 4 is not very strong. I live in San Francisco and we had just one shake. Having grown up in CA and being used to earthquakes, I didn’t bother to check to see what the magnitude was. I was just saying today that I needed to put together a better emergency kit; guess it’s time to do that!
Well hell: we can get quakes that big here in Britain and we don’t even need some humungous great fault to do it.
It’s hot down here in Pasadena, too, and the ground didn’t shake.
Just another data point
“Here’s hoping letting off stress like this keeps the ginormous killer earthquakes at bay.”
Well, if the magnitude scale goes on powers of ten, and a mag 8 happens every 200 years, then how often do you need a mag 4 for that to happen?
About once a week? (1e-4)
I might consider keeping the good china in the box until I need to use it. Better to have a house to come home to, though. Hope it works.
I miss earthquake weather. I moved out of the bay a couple months ago.
The magnitude scale measures energy in powers of ten, but there’s no reason to believe that this has any obvious connection to how often such earthquakes occur.
The magnitude scale measures energy in powers of ten, but there’s no reason to believe that this has any obvious connection to how often such earthquakes occur.
Well, there’s the empirical observation that it is connected – magnitude 5 earthquakes occur 10x less frequently than magnitude 4s.
And since the magnitude scale technically measures energy in powers of 10^(3/2), you’re always missing a factor of 20 – it might make a soothing ritual chant to say otherwise, but there is no way that you’ll ever have enough small earthquakes to ward off the Big One.