Sunday, November 20, 2011

Definitely an earthquake zone!

Yesterday morning was pretty interesting, if experiencing earthquakes interests you.  It interests me in that I'd like not to do it ever again but I'm interested in the next time it happens.  At about 4:30am, we had a 5.1 quake.  That one woke me up because it shook my bed for quite a while.  Later, around 10:45am, we experienced a 5.2 quake.  The second quake rattled the windows and went on for a while.

I remember having a roommate when I first came to Japan who told all the students he was looking forward to his first earthquake.  Personally, I could do without them.

3 comments:

Richard said...

We had our little one here back in August; that was my first. Californians made fun of New Yorkers for being frightened by such a tiny thing...but as I kept reminding people, even a 2 can be scary if you're in a building that's never been through an earthquake before either, and you have no idea if it's structurally sound in all the right places.

Besides, you don't know it's only going to be a 2 when it starts!

Funny thing heard on television afterward: a news anchor asked a seismologist "Is it possible for an aftershock to be bigger than the original quake?" To which he replied "Um...yes, but in that case we'd call the second one the earthquake, and the first one a pre-shock."

Anyway, glad you're well!

Unknown said...

Thanks! I love that little exchange between the anchor and the seismologist. The seismologist probably thought he'd heard them all prior to that little question.

Where I'll be living is right on the coast, one of the cities hit by the tsunami last March. It'll be interesting to see how it's bounced back and what signs still remain of the damage.

Unknown said...

And yeah, the thing about the small earthquakes is you don't know until they're over they're just small earthquakes. Even the big ones start at the beginning and work their way to the end!