Shiver me timbers!

1/4/09

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, we had a magnitude 4.1 earthquake in Cedar this morning! Aren't you jealous? Thanks to both my parents and my grandma living on top of giant fault lines, I have been in earthquakes before, but thankfully this one was rather wimpy. The one we had in Hurricane in 1992 when I was eleven was M5.8 and scary. (By the way, an earthquake that measures 5.0 on the Richter scale has a shaking amplitude ten times larger than one that measures 4.0.) Then in 1994, we were visiting my G-ma Murset in Sherman Oaks, California and the absolutely terrifying M6.7 Northridge quake hit. It was one of the most historically destructive (13 to 20 billion dollars in damage) and there were 60 fatalities. There were dozens of aftershocks throughout the day.

So this morning as Luke and I were chilling out in bed, I felt a few seconds of shaking, but I thought it was Madelyn, who often comes and hides under my bed. Turns out she wasn't in the room....I brushed it off until ten minutes later when my neighbor called and said, "Did you feel that earthquake?" (That, my friends, is the kind of earthquake you want to be in.) When you look at these seismological surveys, you come to realize that our world is shaking all the time--568 registered quakes in this last week--so be grateful that most of them come and go without us even realizing it!