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Central U.S. Earthquake Info
ronbo142 writes "The United States Geological Survey site has real time (or close to it) information on the now two significant events of the day. Check out their site to enter your experience and view other event specific information."
With the supplied link, you need to click through to the Illinois data set.
Or, just click this one: http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/shake/cus/
The summary makes it seem like there have been two different big quakes. In actuality there was a moderate 5.2 followed by what is apparently a 4.6 aftershock.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
That giant ring of fire is on it's way, just like TV predicted!
Blar.
I've been saying all along, it's only a matter of time before the entire state of Illinois slides into Lake Michigan.
Becuase although on the global scale it's pretty small, on the local scale of Southern Illinois it's a doozy. I live in St. Louis, and for many of my peers (being in my mid 30's) it's the first quake that's been felt in living memory. Sure there have been smaller magnitude 2 or 3 quakes, but the last 5.x quake in the area was in 1968... before I was even born. Granted, I'm not a St. Louis native, either.
:)
I have to admit though, the first one I probably would have slept through had it not been for my wife panicking and connecting her elbow with my face, but the second I felt as I was sitting at my desk at work and watched my monitors wobble back and forth. The second I could've easily mistaken for a large convoy of trucks going past the office if only our office was on a bridge over the highway. The first, once I was standing up (thanks to the expedient of body parts) was enough to shake the entire house and toppled a table lamp. Other than that at first my rather groggy brain started to wonder if it was just something freaky happening with my house until I opened the back door to let my dog out and heard what sounded like a rioting zoo in the woods behind my house. Then I knew it was a quake, and then it was just a matter of going to USGS website and seeing what the magnitude was.
Really quite an odd experience. Although they talk a lot about the New Madrid fault and how an earthquake of 7+ magnitude is overdue, you don't really think about it much until a quake really hits. On the bright side, maybe this mornings tremors will make people think more about earthquakes and the effect they can have.
5.2 is a big quake to those who've never felt one before. My personal high is a 6.8 but that wasn't in St. Louis, either
The main earthquake and the aftershock are on an fault line known as the New Madrid fault line. This fault line is known for making earthquakes up to 8 on the ricther scale. Last time that did happen was in the 19th century.
I am fairly sure that this event now is part of normal movement of the fault line, due to happen every 20 to 50 years.
People in the area should expect aftershocks in the next one or two weeks, maybe longer. Btu the aftershock pattern depends on many factors that I don't know all.
For those interested the waveform of the earthquake was recorded by people interested in recording earthquakes in nearby states. The plots can be seen here, http://www.simnet.is/jonfr500/earthquake/othersten.htm
But I have collected them into one nice web page. The data is near real time and is updated every 5 min, at least that is the case for most of the plots