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My kids just experienced their first earthquake

 
 
 
crazyfingers

crazyfingers

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It's April vacation this week and my wife took the kids to visit grandma and grandpa just south of Windsor Ontario, across from Detroit.

At 8:01 pm this evening they had a 3.6 earthquake. Small by west coast standards but big for that area.

http://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/region-shocked-by-earthquake-centred-near-amherstburg

I felt a smaller one back in the 1970's near Boston, MA but several larger ones when in Tokyo. Could feel the high rise hotel swaying!

So anyway the kids have something to tell their friends about at school next week.
 
Wow. Glad it was interesting and not scary.
 
Reading the OP article... It’s interesting that so many people described a booming\explosion type noise with the quake
 
couch_sloth said:
Reading the OP article... It’s interesting that so many people described a booming\explosion type noise with the quake
Click to expand...
That'd be the compressional wave. It often feels like a rather sudden booming jolt; sharp-eared animals can often hear it traveling through the ground for a few seconds before it hits and freak out.
 
Politesse said:
couch_sloth said:
Reading the OP article... It’s interesting that so many people described a booming\explosion type noise with the quake
Click to expand...
That'd be the compressional wave. It often feels like a rather sudden booming jolt; sharp-eared animals can often hear it traveling through the ground for a few seconds before it hits and freak out.
Click to expand...

There is a laundry list of phenomena that are said to immediately precede earthquakes... I've been through a bunch of them and never experienced any of those lights or sounds.
My first one was while on the top floor of a high-rise in San Fran - it swayed radically. Everything hanging on walls was banging back and forth... very scary. Scarier - another 5-point-something quake in South San Fran warehouse district, an area reclaimed from the bay and built on fill dirt. Not where ya wanna be, as that fill dirt is subject to liquefaction. Almost got hit be two toppling Marshall stacks (bigass amplifiers - was playing guitar so loudly when it hit, I thought I caused it!).
But scarier still, was waking up in a motel room near John Wayne airport in Ontario SoCal, as the bed I was sleeping in skidded loudly across the tile floor and slammed into a wall. That quake was "only" a 3.5, but it scared the hell out of me; NEVER want to go through another quake. Not even a little tremble.
 
Politesse said:
couch_sloth said:
Reading the OP article... It’s interesting that so many people described a booming\explosion type noise with the quake
Click to expand...
That'd be the compressional wave. It often feels like a rather sudden booming jolt; sharp-eared animals can often hear it traveling through the ground for a few seconds before it hits and freak out.
Click to expand...
It’s just something I never noticed, here in California. e.g. I was just 20 miles from the epicenter of the Loma Prieta earthquake (1989), and the only sounds I remember was a slight rumbling and the creaking noises from the walls and floor.
 
My last quake was just the p-wave... I had to see it pop up on the usgs site before I was sure it wasn't just someone dropping a heavy object outside.
 
It's rather ironic that it was yesterday evening because it was actually just yesterday afternoon that something on the some website caught my eye and I had just done some reading up on the San Fran earthquake of 1906.

About yesterday's earthquake, there are several local news reports from around Detroit/Windsor on the earthquake and they all mention the "explosion/boom" sound. I don't know if the wife and kids heard it. I'll ask them more when they get home. My daughter did say that at first they thought it was a large truck going down the road.

They are in Harrow, OT, about 7 miles east of the center.

The earthquake has been re-estimated up to 4.1 now. Really quite large for that area.

http://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/estimate-on-amherstburg-earthquake-magnitude-increased-to-4-1
http://windsorstar.com/news/local-n...-amherstburg-farm-youve-got-to-check-this-out
 
The only earthquake I ever experienced was on New Year's Eve, 2000. (31/12/99 just to be clear). It shook most of Northeastern Ontario.

It was about 3 AM. I woke up standing in the living room. We thought it was the Millennium Bug. (Then a chimney fire. Then we realised it was "only" an earthquake.)
 
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