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Comment by sva_ | Hacker News Reader

Comparison: The 2011 earthquake had a magnitude of 9.0 - 9.1 (but it had a 7.2 foreshock 2 days before.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...

The thing most people don't mention is that after the March 11th 2011 earthquake, we had daily aftershocks, the kind you could easily feel, which lasted for months. Seems to happen mostly at night, most disconcertingly, as I was woken up out of bed more times than I could count with ones large enough to cause me to jump up and think the "big one" was hitting Tokyo.

Took me a good year, and moving out of Japan, to calm down about it and realize just how much daily stress it had caused me, how much on edge you are after something like this. Of course, nothing happened, but when your system is constantly in heightened awareness mode, the way I expect soldiers in a warzone feel wondering if there's someone around the corner waiting to get you, you start to build up PTSD in a real way.

Side note: add in a bit of nuclear fallout concern, plus having young kids and some playgrounds in Tokyo getting abnormally high enough readings they had to close them... oh, in addition to tainted food supply, and you'll maybe understand.

I remember the aftershocks, and I still have ptsd regarding earthquakes. I've felt a few small ones back stateside and feels like it starts the cycle over again. Not sure how long it will take for me to get over it.

talk to a doctor

Just curious, what would you expect to happen if they did?

I don’t exactly understand why he’s being downvoted. Perhaps he could have worded things better, but I read it in good faith.

A doctor may be able to tell them some specific coping mechanisms that could be helpful in breaking the thought loop they were otherwise unaware of, & sometimes a short duration of medication like a benzo can break the anxiety enough so that it doesn’t come back.

Obviously, it’s hard to tell over the internet, & that’s why it’s recommended to see a professional.

If he/she actually has PTSD-- which is entirely within the realm of possibility, there are medications such as Prazosin as well as therapy that can help.

Start to accept that your just a human in a world not steered or controlled by humans, i always try to imagine being a astronaut looking back to earth and think:

Every single human ever born, and every single word ever written and every single day in history lived was on that small wonderful marble in the vastness of space.

What more can happen to you then to die? Living i fear.

We all have to die, but we don't have to live in fear.

We visited Japan 3 years ago and it stuck with me how normal earthquakes, alerts for this and tsunamis are.

Like wtf!

Japan is not only the country hit most frequently by a large margin, it is also the country hit by the strongest natural disasters.

It's certainly up there [1]. I didn't realize that Costa Rica and the Philippines were even higher than Japan.

According to [2] the US has the most severe weather in the world, which is interesting. I've certainly experienced some of it, tornadoes are horrifying.

I had a crazy experience in Oklahoma City once where I ran out of my hotel because of an earthquake only to see two funnels on the ground coming towards me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_d...

[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2013/05/16/extreme-we...

The Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand had a lot of aftershocks and a lot of people left the city to avoid them. Here is an article saying that there were 11,200 aftershocks in the following 2 years.

https://www.odt.co.nz/news/national/11000-aftershocks-christ...

Yep can confirm, I lived in Christchurch through the quake and aftermath. Aftershocks multiple times a day for months afterwards.

Living in the Bay Area and right atop a fault, I feel phantom shakes. I usually have my ham radio tuned to the local repeater and people start reporting real ones almost instantaneously. So I use that as indicator to calm myself.

Hasn’t affected my life but it’s always there in the back of my mind. I realised I’m also a lot more sensitive to them than anyone else I know. Almost all the major ones - including the one in Napa have woken me up, usually in cold sweat and heart palpitations.

While I hope it is a small quake compared to the 2011 earthquake, the main 2011 earthquake came 2 days after a 7.1 foreshock quake:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Japan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...

For those unware, the magnitude scales used to measure earthquakes are logarithmic, with released energy increasing by a factor of about 32 (10^3/2 to be exact) for each step. Thus, the 9.1 earthquake from 2011 released about 500 times as much energy as the one from today.

I feel like it should also be added that part of (not all) the reason we use logarithmic scale for these things to begin with is precisely because their "damage" or impact is not linearly correlated to the energy released from the event (same goes to dBPL used in sound pressure).

Unfortunately, it's not linear to the logarithmic scale either so it's hard to get a intuitive "feeding" from it.

I'd say it's something in between but closer to the linear scale in earthquake's case.

Hope today's was not the foreshock to something bigger.

Reminder that 9 isn't ~25% larger than 7, its 100x larger.

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