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5.5 Earthquake Hits Canada; Felt in US Midwest, New England
joelmax writes "A magnitude 5.5 earthquake hit central Canada this afternoon, rattling buildings from Windsor to Montreal to several US states. The epicentre of the quake was in Quebec, 61 kilometres north of Ottawa, according to the US Geological Survey, and struck at 1:41 pm EDT." If you felt this quake, it would be great to put your location in the title of your comments, below — with lat/long coordinates even better.
I was in a boardroom on the 6th (top) floor of our building for a 1:30 pm meeting and just as we're getting underway the table and chairs were shaking. Was pretty heavy for about 20 seconds and then faded off over the next minute. We're a lot of government buildings so the policy is to evacuate. We actually tried to continue our meeting but then they finally got to our floor to check it out they found us and told us to leave. As you can guess, no more work is really being done today. It's pretty exciting for us as we don't get this here.
One interesting note, when I did go outside most everyone was on their cell phone and several were stating that they couldn't get service. I would guess because of the increase in volume at that time.
Get a map... its the east side of Canada.
Yes, Toronto is ego central though...
That's not exactly Central Canada. You can't go much farther east without being in the Atlantic. Granted, it probably impacted more Canadians than an earthquake anywhere else in the country would have.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
But I figured a USGS link was in order.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
http://xkcd.com/723/
At first I thought it was because the US won their group on the world championship. But then I realised the are no football fans in America.
42.31124, -83.67578 Thought it was a particularly large person stomping around near my cube. The floor shimmied slightly. It was cool.
I felt it in my basement apartment in Toronto.
But was it really an earthquake, or did the thought of all those politicians gathering for the G20 make the ground vomit?
-I only code in BASIC.-
Or, to save time, you could just try querying the Twitter API for any tweets with the #earthquake tag, check the location of said tweets, and plug those into Google maps. Or, for an even faster (but more constrained) result, you could just check the USGS Did You Feel It? map. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/dyfi/events/us/2010xwa7/us/index.html
I'm from California, a 5.5 is about a large truck going by. One time, we had a 5.4 in the Bay Area and it was one of those quick jolt ones. I thought the fat guy in the apartment above me fell down. I think we had a 5-something last week, I didn't notice since I was at Disneyland.
Mississauga near Pearson Airport. 4th floor of office building. Wavy and shaking. Nothing was broken but you could really feel it. 43.638968,-79.609534
On the 5th floor of the Key Bank building. EVERYBODY PANIC!!!
What a bunch of wimps.
Here in southern California, a mere 5.5 would hardly even arouse anyone's interest. Probably make page 1 of the local section unless the Padres made a big trade; then it would be relegated to page 2.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Quebec's finally separating!
It's in part of Canada that is prone to earthquakes, extending roughly along the Ottawa and St. Lawrence River Valleys. The increased activity along here is related to two factors: 1) this is an old "suture" where pieces of continents were accreted onto the rest of North America a long time ago (the later half of the Paleozoic) culminating in the building of the Appalachian Mountain system (the Appalachian Orogeny); 2) the suture stopped being an active plate boundary after the continental pieces were fused onto the continent, but crustal stress still occurs because of the relatively "recent" melting of the continental ice sheets ~10k years ago. The weight of the couple kilometres of ice during the glaciation depressed the crust, and much of central Canada has been experiencing isostatic rebound (i.e. rising back up again) ever since the weight was removed. That process slowly deforms the crust, and when the stress gets too great the rock moves, generating earthquakes. The stress tends to get released along old zones of crustal weakness (i.e. #1).
This seismic hazard map by the Geological Survey of Canada shows the increased risk along the St. Lawrence River rather nicely. More details here.
Having said all that, the level of activity in this part of Canada pales in comparison to earthquakes in the area of an active plate boundary, such as California, where the deformation rates are higher, the earthquakes more frequent, and often higher magnitude. It means that building codes along the St. Lawrence-Ottawa River Valleys are fairly strict when it comes to earthquake resistance, just in case, but a significant earthquake is still outside most people's everyday experience. I'm sure people are freaking out (I'm ~1000km away, so I felt nothing).
If you felt this quake, it would be great to put your location in the title of your comments, below -- with lat/long coordinates even better.
...but do NOT post your zip+4 code, as that would be a huge invasion of privacy. :D
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I looked outside and saw wrecked cars strewn about. Some cars are overturned and on fire. Some buildings appear to be deteriorating in front of my very eyes.
They I remembered I'm in Upstate New York. People here can't drive. The state is broke. Yesterday looked pretty much the same.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It's unusual for the location.
No, it isn't.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
They have revised it down to 5.0 per the USGS.
I did feel it. Was on a recliner sofa working on my laptop, and felt the sofa rock back and forth. Did not think it was a quake at the time. See
http://baheyeldin.com/places/canada/earthquake-2010-june-23-1341-quebecontario.html">here.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Don't worry. When California gets its largest quake since 1935, people will stand up and notice that too.
Thank God. That's thousands of miles from America.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Any word on who they're planning to charge for failing to predict this monster?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
http://xkcdsucks.blogspot.com/2010/04/comic-723-waves-of-confusion.html
There is already a wikipedia entry for it (almost 1 hr ago) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Ontario_earthquake
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
I felt it in Montreal, QC, It's the first one I've felt since i was born and I'm 21, so for anyone saying its common then do your research. Just because everyone's talking about it doesnt mean we're freaking out over it, I felt more shaking this morning with construction on my street, so it's not a big deal other than it being rare.
It was pretty cool.
Are we talking about the same Michigan? I was on a flight that landed in Detroit at about 2pm CST, and on the way to my destination I saw NUMEROUS buildings just devastated by the earthquake, a lack of essential services, disruption of civil order, severe deterioration of roads and infrastructure, looting in broad daylight ... you name it.
They must have been near the earthquake's epicenter.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
I lived in Calgary for a couple of years, which is warmer than Edmonton but not by all that much. It never got anywhere near that cold.
Since recordings began, the only time it dropped to -40C or lower in downtown Edmonton was January 26, 1972. That was a Wednesday, not a Tuesday, by the way.
My lab is on the 4th floor of an old building downtown Toronto and I definitely felt it. I have lived in this area my whole life and have never felt an earthquake before. At first I didn't know what it was, once I figured it out I started moving to the stairs.
I know lots of people get more and bigger earth quakes then this, but for a first timer like me it's pretty freaky. Ancient 400lb spectrum analyzers don't normally move.
lat=43.660153
lon=-79.376972
Just making sure everyone knows their facts: Remember magnitude doesn't measure INTENSITY of shaking but instead amount of energy released at the moment the earthquake begins. Yes, the scale is logarithmic. So, a 5.0 earthquake is 32 times stronger than a 4.0, with a 6.0 releasing more than 1000 times the energy of a 4.0. Feeling that 5.7 on the 15th of this month here in SoCal, the first thing that pops in my head is "How strong is this one going to feel - is it the Big One"? It's actually quite cool to be able to feel the P-waves arrive first followed by the S-waves if the earthquake is both strong enough and far away enough for speed differences to be noticed. It's also nice to notice someone mention the glacial rebound earthquakes of areas in far NE U.S. and S.E. Canada - that's the first thing I guessed the moment I heard about it.
I'm from Hamilton, Ontario Canada my house shook a little, felt odd that's all. 4312'50.61"N 7947'19.50"W
no, the exact formula is 2/3 log(M)-10.7. Therefore, a full step is actually 10^(3/2) (approximately 31) times stronger, not 10.