Zorac (zorac) wrote,
Zorac
zorac

Earthquake!

Hah. My late night is justified after all. Had I actually gone to bed at a sensible hour, I probably wouldn't have experienced the excitment of a monitor-jiggling earthquake. Probably only around 3 on the Richter Scale, but far more fun than anything you get from one of those earthquake simulators (e.g. the one at the Natural History Museum). It certainly had an entertaining effect on my Galileo thermometer.
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  • 3 comments

jiggery_pokery

September 22 2002, 20:35:40 UTC 18 years ago

The BBC sez 'twas a 4.8-ster. Now admittedly it was probably only a 4.8 at its epicentre and rather less wobbly in other parts of the country, making your estimate of a 3 in Kidlington perfectly plausible. Despite the BBC web site saying it reached North Yorkshire, I didn't feel a dicky bird here. Mum reckons that their other coverage suggested it reached South Yorks - perhaps the web site just got S and N mixed up?

/me is jealous - I don't think I've actually sat through a noticeable (say, 2.5+?) earthquake at all. At least, the earth didn't move for me if I have done.

zorac

September 23 2002, 00:12:24 UTC 18 years ago

OK, I probably need to revise my guess upwards, otherwise it was about 64 times more powerful at the epicentre, which seems a little much to me. Quite an experience, though. At first I thought it was just something heavy driving past (low rumbling, plus I can sometimes feel that), or maybe some late night DIY (wouldn't be the first time for that), but when the real shockwaves hit, it was obviously either a quake or an extremely large bomb (yes, I did check for mushroom clouds ;-)

Anyway, I'm pretty chuffed to have felt it, what with my near miss with a volcano earlier in the year (they had an erruption on Reunion about two weeks before I was due to go out. Bummer. Did get to see the steaming lava flow, though.)

jiggery_pokery

September 23 2002, 06:16:29 UTC 18 years ago

Perhaps someone's been dropping the


somewhere. Apparently the epicentre is Dudley - I can think of few places more deserving of a big concrete donkey...

The British Geological Survey has got all excited, as you might expect, and there's a nice map of how it felt available. It doesn't stretch as far south as Oxford, but it's roughly consistent with you feeling a 3-ish one.