M 4.8 – 2024 Whitehouse Station, New Jersey Earthquake | Hacker News Reader

M 4.8 – 2024 Whitehouse Station, New Jersey Earthquake

earthquake.usgs.gov

So since I live near epicenter, there's one thing that changed geographically very recently. Nearby round valley reservoir was being worked on for years, last fall they got the authorization to pump it back to full and it was told it might take years. Rainy asf winter though so it's pumped back almost full from already 66% to 92% now. I'm wondering if billions of gallons of water getting added nearby affected pressure on the fault. Here's today's operations data (we just had 3.5in of rain past couple days too): https://www.njwsa.org/uploads/1/0/8/0/108064771/data.pdf

EDIT: just had another aftershock right after posting this. Felt the 2.0 a couple hours ago too

EDIT2: yup usgs finally added it https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us7000ma95...

It's possible. Seismicity has been associated with reservoirs[1] (the most well known is probably an earthquake in Egypt following the construction of the Aswan High Dam) and even rainfall[2]. There are both potential triggers from the increase in the stress on the fault, as you state, due to the weight of the water; and (probably more important) the increase in pore fluid pressure along the fault.

It's a bit complicated, because the increase in stress on the fault from the weight of the reservoir can actually be primarily an increase in normal stress, i.e. an increase in the clamping force preventing the fault from slipping (i.e. the crust on either side of the fault sliding, i.e. the earthquake), so the weight of the reservoir can actually impede, rather than promote, seismicity. However if the geometry of the system is just right such that the increase in shear stress from the weight of the reservoir can increase on the fault, then the reservoir could really trigger the earthquake. Typically, though, the increase in pore fluid pressure is the most likely trigger as it's not geometry dependent--pumping a fracture with fluids will always promote failure. This is what happens with the seismicity associated with natural gas fracking and subsequent wastewater fluid injection.

The thing that is hard to grapple with all of this is that changes in stress and fluid pressure on the fault are really, really small compared with the ambient stress and fluid pressure. These are tiny changes, but there is good reason to believe that many faults, especially those in seismically active areas, are very close to frictional failure (i.e., slipping and producing an earthquake) all the time. So therefore little things can perturb the system. However, it's worth keeping in mind that most of these small changes slightly increase or decrease the time to failure (as the primary loading that is causing the stress on the fault is probably continually happening at very low rates), rather than being the ultimate cause of the earthquake.

[1]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C48&q=dam...

[2]: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200...

Good shit, this is the kind of answer I hoped for posting on HN. I don't know too much about earthquake seismology, but I am curious and know where to pull random data.

So I thought, if the ground is moving the aquifer levels might change (no clue whether they would go up or down). I just pulled the ground water levels for Readington Township's well (in which whitehouse station is a place). Sure enough can clearly see when the earthquake hit: https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/4035170744525...

So is this expected? Is this a thing that normally happens with earthquakes?

EDIT: Japan paper was cool https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art... apparently they measure increased seismicity at times of high inflow. Also just had a big aftershock approx 22:00UTC. sounded like a bomb (I am in whitehouse station now)

Does anyone know if there's a real-time feed of Earthquakes somewhere? The USGS website doesn't post the Earthquakes until 10-15 minutes after it's over - which nullifies any type of automated warning for our data centers.

Curious: Why might data centers need earthquake warnings, and how might they prepare if given a few minutes or seconds of heads up?

I can think of some ideas: parking the heads on hard drives is one.

Magnetic hard drives are sensitive to vibration. You can shout at hard drives and measure the effects (video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4).

One of the worst-case scenarios is a head crash. A head crash will damage the media and may result in data loss. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_crash

My guess is that earthquakes powerful enough to cause a head crash are powerful enough for widespread destruction anyway, but I’m no expert. I did some quick searches for hard drives damaged by earthquake, and the only results I got were scenarios where the hard drives or the whole rack got knocked over by the earthquake and hit the floor.

Some other thoughts:

- Personnel-level warning to immediately rerack servers, close racks, and get off ladders and away from fall hazards

- Proactively spin up generators to reduce failover in the more-likely event of a power disruption

- Potentially temporarily shut off very large circulation fans so that blades don't collide with the housings

- Potentially stop and carefully restart cooling water loops, in case there's a rupture in the system somewhere

Personally, I’d rather have the generators off when the earthquake hits!

Good list.

Add to this: initiate failover or zone transfer of distributed servers / services to other DCs outside the likely impacted area.

Need realtime seismographs, my friend's dad has one he built as a hobby up in quebec city that picked it up: https://alainmichaud.ca/

Another great site with a ton of citizen stations (some are placed next to USGS seismographs too): https://shakenet.raspberryshake.org

There is in Japan. I don't know how the realtime data feed is set up, but here is one public webpage that shows the degree of shaking as it happens:

https://typhoon.yahoo.co.jp/weather/jp/earthquake/kyoshin/

I felt a moderate earthquake here in Yokohama a few days ago. I had my phone with me, so I clicked my bookmark for that page and, before the shaking stopped, could see that it was a magnitude 6 with epicenter offshore from Fukushima--nothing to worry about. A minute or so later the permanent record of the quake was online:

https://typhoon.yahoo.co.jp/weather/jp/earthquake/2024040412...

30% is 16.5 Billion gallons.

OP is saying that much rain got into a reservoir that sits on top of an ancient volcanic caldera and has no rivers flowing into? Unexpectedly? and they didn’t think to stop pumping water in from the South Branch or release some water?

The math ain’t mathing.

It's not at full capacity yet, they are pumping into it daily (around 200 million gallons) until it is. Only spruce run reservoir upstream of it fills naturally (and is spilling currently).

Operations data for the reservoir updates every morning during workdays, so we'll know Monday if they paused pumping into it after the quakes, I don't have any better than daily numbers for it. Letting the water down isn't an option, most of the downstream gauges on the south branch were just at or near flood stage. River gauges available here: https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/index.php?wfo=phi

Just to follow up on this, there was another way to tell they maybe shut the pumps off for a few hours after the quake (and I linked it in the same comment). The downstream gauge: https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=phi&gage=...

Felt that very strongly in southern Westchester county NY. Not like the 2011 earthquake I felt in NYC, which was kind of slow and made the building I was in sway violently; this was more like the vibrations from a huge truck passing nearby, but more intense. Loud and very unpleasant, about 15 seconds duration. Did not like that at all, am now inspecting all our services like gas and water for disruption, checking for cracks and so on.

There actually was a large truck coming down my block in Brooklyn at the same time it started and it took me a second to realize that no, it actually was an earthquake.

And I definitely agree, the 2011 one was more of a sway, this felt like a rumble.

I'm on Long Island and there was a train passing at the same time.

Funny you say that! I live in NJ now and felt the quake today. I just brushed it away as a truck passing by (I grew up in Brooklyn.) In NYC, it is so common for large trucks, major construction, pile drivers, subways running under the building, bad roads causing trucks to shake, etc...that I am just used to this.

I have not yet gotten accustomed to the stillness of suburbs despite being here for years now. (Side note: In NYC you can also get stillness and quiet, usually by going upwards into skyscrapers)

As a native Californian this provokes a bit of a chuckle. Try a six plus sometime!

But seriously, I hope everything is fine.

Buildings a quite a bit older on the east coast and building codes are obviously more lax so we should probably have some empathy here haha.

Plus the main aqua duct that supplies several million people is old and fragile. A simple earthquake could possibly turn into a Flint, Michigan level disaster.

The geology of the east coast makes earthquakes about ten times more intense (according to usgs) so this is similar to a west coast high five.

What does "intense" mean?

The shockwaves travel further. The 2011 earthquake was in Virginia and everyone felt it on the eastern seaboard. It was only 2.4 M too. Still.

In case anyone was curious, the 2011 Virginia earthquake was magnitude 5.8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Virginia_earthquake

Yes. Thanks for the correction. I didn’t know

Do you have a link to share on that?

I'm aware that Atlantic and mid-American quakes are felt over a much wider area than Left-coast temblors, because of the more-intact, less-fractured, largely limestone and granitic foundation bedrock (as opposed to a largely fractured sedimentary basement along the Pacific seaboard). But is the actual shaking intensity greater? AFAIU that's mostly affected by factors such as ground liquifaction, total ground water, and the like, which tend to be fairly strongly localised in effect. E.g., you can find seismic hazard maps of the SF Bay Area which show high-risk regions, largely on fill, reclaimed marsh, and sand dunes (e.g., the Marina, Financial District, SOMA, Sunset and Richmond districts of San Francisco), as opposed to bedrock (Twin Peaks, Potrero Hill). The former all amplify ground movement, the latter tend to shake far less.

River bottom land and estuaries on the East Coast would similarly show higher seismic motion, but I'm not sure this carries over for the region as a whole.

As an easterner who lived in California for many years, the breathless news coverage of a tiny thunderstorm in CA which had a bit of lightning provoked a bit of a chuckle. The report was accompanied with statistics about how rarely lightning injured people and there was no real cause for concern.

Totally! The company I work for in Los Angeles gave a people a work from home day because it was raining. You can't be expected to drive to work in the rain? Not after COVID apparently.

in fairness, the wildfire risk in CA is pretty high so lightning could be a legitimate big concern

Ha, I'm glad you capitalized on what was a great opportunity for a bit of inter-coastal banter. I'm only sorry my response was delayed. Perhaps we can reconcile our feelings at a holistic soul-healing retreat :)

it's a 4.8 lol

> it's a 4.8 lol

Equivalent in lateral motion/shakiness to a California 6.0 due to the shallow depth of the 4.8

Lol, now you are making stuff up.

Most local magnitude scales are

>>> determined from the logarithm of the amplitude of waves recorded by seismographs. Adjustments are included to compensate for the variation in the distance between the various seismographs and the epicenter of the earthquake[1].

So unless people in the East have seismographs located farther underground with scientists staffing them really deep underground -for reasons beyond me- "Shallow depth" is irrelevant.

Also, there's no such thing as a "feels like X magnitude" earthquake [2]

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

[2] https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/22348/what-...

From your stack overflow link:

>"Feels like" is measured on seismic intensity scales such as the Mercalli scale. These measure the peak acceleration or velocity at a given point, or the damage done by the earthquake. Intensity is influenced by many things, such as the depth of the earthquake, the distance to the ruptured section of the fault, and the local surface material.

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

NYC has had 5.x earthquakes that have caused e.g. chimneys to collapse, something unheard of in california.

The Mercalli scale you cite is defined in roman numerals.

The parent posted decimals.

As you said, they are not the same thing.

Are you intentionally being pedantic? The point doesn't have anything to do with whether decimals are used or if conversions are direct. The point is that a 4.8 earthquake can feel different given numerous factors. The Mercalli scale attempts to capture the surface-level disruption, rather than the inherent force at the site of the quake as the Richter scale does.

Depth IS relevant to how an earthquake feels (as opposed to your assertion it isn't)--even the usgs publishes depth information. If you go back to the stack overflow link you posted, you can clearly see that a lower magnitude earthquake can be much more damaging.

The point is, richter measurement doesn't tell the whole story, and yes, you could say that a 4.8 would feel like a 6.0, even if we don't have a good way beyond the mercalli scale of discussing that. That's because the original output energy is only partially relevant to how someone experiences a seismic event.

tl;dr: your pedantic assertion that there's no conversion between the two is correct. your assertion that depth doesn't matter for feeling quakes is incorrect.

Yes, the Roman geologists did not use decimals but fractions. "S···· or S∷ | Dextans, dextantis or decunx, decuncis" would be the equivalent of .8 since they used "a duodecimal rather than a decimal system for fractions."

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

>earthquake I felt in NYC

I am getting anxious just thinking about this. With all those sky scrappers..

They thought of this!

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

Sky scrappers are the safest buildings to be in during an Earthquake. The most dangerous are the oldest much smaller masonry multilevel buildings.

This is like flying commercial. Your brain knows it is statistically safest. But your palms sweat during takeoff and landing no matter.

I was explaining the same to my wife. I think the last one was in D.C. and it felt the room was spinning slightly. Today was quite a different experience and truly scary for a moment as it started to ramp up and seemed like it wouldn't stop getting more intense.

That was eerie! I felt my apartment building start to rock and sway as the walls were creaking. Not something I’m used to as a NY native, and not something I loved to experience 20+ floors above the ground.

I thought it was a train or truck going by

I thought wind at first because it's been stormy lately

My first earthquake experience. I thought maybe I was imagining things but when the walls started to shake I got out

I remember being in a 4th floor office and feeling the building sway. I can't imagine how terrifying 20+ floors up would be.

I was in the one in Seattle around 2000 on the 5th floor of a building, and I distinctly remember walking down the hall with the building swaying like a boat in a storm, wondering when the whole thing was just going to snap and crumble into a pile of rubble. Luckily it turns out they make modern buildings not do that. I've been back to that building and they still have cracks in the stairwell from it, though.

On the 37th floor of my office buildin I didn't even feel it. Others said they thought it was the wind. Tuned mass dampers are no joke.

On the 38th floor in Hell's Kitchen, I felt my chair and desk shake. It was like 10 seconds long.

One of my neighbours often close their doors with force which causes the wall to vibrate. Then I noticed things not attached to the walls also were shaking and understood it's an earthquake. I also noticed lots of birds flying near the Hudson River. I have never thought I would feel an earthquake here.

I also searched Google to see if there's an earthquake, and at 10:23am nothing was showing up. I remember a year ago Google used to ask "Have you felt your building start shaking", and nothing this time.

I was at a coffee shop in Astoria and it sounded like the subway running under. My first thought was that there is no line under this street (been living here forever). Then I thought maybe a jet liner flew over too close. But then judging by other people's reaction, I realized that this was an earthquake. I had no idea that you can hear earthquakes...

I experienced a 3.8 (I think) in Dallas some years ago, 30 stories up. It was likely caused by oil drilling action in the area, as Texas is not an earthquake zone if I remember correctly. It was not fun, no dampers in that building.

I remember living on the 30th floor in Manhattan during Sandy. I grew up in a hurricane-prone area so remembered to fill the tub.

Watching all the water slosh around as the building swayed was... disconcerting.

If any west-coasters are confused as to how this is news: the Northeast is sort of geologically unusual for the US in that we have almost no surprising, sudden weather thingies.

No tornados, mild thunderstorm, occasional hurricanes (but they are usually weakened a bit compared to, like, Florida by the time they get up here and they’ve spent a long time going up the coast so they tend to be well tracked by forecasters), some flooding but not much, and no earthquakes. Our bad weather events are usually blizzards, which you can see coming and which take a while to accumulate.

We’re right in the middle of the North American plate and the area is covered in gentle old hills and mountains.

So, we’re all just not used to the planet surprising us!

What is a Nor'easter?

A lot of cold water and maybe snow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_1992_nor%27easter

its a lot of warm moisture that comes up the coast from the southeast and slams into cold air from canada and can drop a lot of snow/wind. It can cause bad storms in the ocean and high seas.

> What is a Nor'easter?

Literally: a cold hurricane.

Some people misuse the term to mean "a blizzard affecting New England and/or the Northeast", but it actually specifically refers to a storm that's been pushed inland by sea winds coming from the northeast, off the Atlantic Ocean. That specific pattern results in a particularly cold and brutal storm.

Nor'easters are technically cyclones, just like hurricanes, and the two are very similar in many regards. The difference is that a Nor'easter forms further north, in cold water, and it is actually strengthened by cold air, whereas hurricanes form further south and are diminished in strength as they cool off.

https://scijinks.gov/noreaster/

Weather nerds will get very confused by ‘a cold hurricane’ since hurricanes are tropical cyclones and tropical cyclones have a warm core by definition.

…but they’ll be fine with a ‘a big cold cyclone’ I guess ;)

> Weather nerds will get very confused by ‘a cold hurricane’ since hurricanes are tropical cyclones and tropical cyclones have a warm core by definition.

Well, it's literally true: a hurricane is a tropical cyclone, and a nor'easter is an extratropical cyclone. A nor'easter is literally the "cold" counterpart of a hurricane!

So like, the Nor'easter is a cryo-cyclone and the regular hurricanes are pyro-cyclones!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nor'easter

It’s just a hurricane in the winter, no biggie. We would enjoy the snow and check out the surf (from a safe distance). I think you aren’t officially supposed to suggest the latter though.

I mean, it really isn't a huge deal, but the nor'easter that just came across us here in southern maine left about 350k people without power in a state of 1.6 million people.

That's not nothing.

I throw on a dry suit and go surfing. It's awesome.

we've had tornadoes in NJ..

The East Coast gets microtornadoes that deshingle roofs or tip trees over.

The Midwest gets MS Paint eraser tool tornadoes.

The East Coast gets EF3 and EF4 tornadoes.

We get about one a decade in upstate NY.

We're also on a shelf of hard rock, so a quake in NJ is felt by all of New England. Keys on the wall were shaking here 100mi away.

I felt it in Boston, albeit very faintly

Also, earthquakes on the east coast travel further, and are more likely to damage structures than earthquakes of the same magnitude on the west coast[0]. That's due to underlying geological differences.

The magnitude is one immediately-available measure of the strength of an earthquake, but it's not the only measurement that's relevant to determining the size or impact of an earthquake. Depth, duration, location - there are many other measurable (and also immeasurable) factors which parameterize a seismic event.

[0] https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/east-vs-west-coast-...

I am very confused with you classifying earthquakes under "weather thingies"

Natural disaster thingies

We can have natural disasters they just have to schedule beforehand.

The thought process was: I know earthquakes aren’t really weather, so I’ll tack on “thingies” to make it clear that I’m making up some new more generalized term.

The point was to group all the… I dunno, whatever, surprising attacks by the planet into one thing. I can’t think of a real term for this, I think there might not be one, I guess I could call it something like “weather or geological surprises” but that’s just dull.

Sim City "Disaster" menu items

A taxonomy my monkey brain can actually understand.

The SC2K siren sfx file just played itself in my head.

Natural disasters

Acts of God as the insurance industry calls them!

It just illustrates how people in the NE think about natural disasters. Basically any big natural event is weather-related.

When the 2011 Virginia quake happened, I was somewhere in the Boston area sitting in my parked car, and at first I thought it was a strong wind rocking my car side-to-side. It took a few seconds for me to realize the shaking wasn't a "weather thing"

Natural phenomena, extending beyond what's strictly weather, often get lumped into "meteorology", including earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes. One fairly well-known case is the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), whose remit includes not just weather by hydrology, seismology, and volcanology.

Generally: concerns of an extra-human, non-biological origin. E.g., JMA doesn't address pandemics.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Meteorological_Agency>

Eh, there are plenty of areas of the northeast that are affected much differently by these events than where you are. For example, Vermont has had multiple catastrophic floods in memory, including last summer and Hurricane Irene. Mountainous and coastal areas magnify these systems, the lowlands and developed megalopolis region may be truer to your claims.

Yeah, our reaction to this here is reminding me of what happens when Oregon or Atlanta gets an inch of snow. An earthquake (that is felt) is just not something that we experience often.

I remember when Atlanta got 2" and people were literally abandoning their cars on highways [1], whereas in the northeast people are out driving in blizzards.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/30/268720258...

NYC seems to have been taken quite by surprise by a storm last September.

I grew up in New England, but have lived in California for 30 years. A 4.7 is waaay larger than anything I've personally felt here!

Plus the Northeast is just not made for quakes. The 200 year old house I grew up in would probably have creaked pretty alarmingly.

House I'm renovating here in the northeast had the concrete in the basement poured yesterday... Going to head over there to see if any weirdness occurred

Good way of removing any trapped air!

This one weird trick seismologists don’t want you to know about!

You think the west coast has tornados and hurricanes? West coast by the pacific ocean has even milder weather than the east.

I think you’re drawing the wrong conclusion from the post. There was no suggestion of tornadoes on the West Coast. It was a discussion of relatively isolated meteorological phenomena in the northeast corridor.

While not part of Tornado Alley, the west coast does get tornadoes. There was at least one when I lived there, and I think I heard about another within the past year (maybe two). The one when I lived there actually started as a waterspout and came across the beach near Santa Monica to be reclassified as a tornado.

I'm not sure how this thread got off on this tangent but I don't think there was ever any attempt to comment on whether there are or are not tornadoes on the west coast. The discussion was the lack of extreme events typical of the northeast.

It's more about the details left out really. I lived in LA area for ~5 years, and 1 tornado. In one Tornado Alley storm system, you can get multiple twisters. There's of course more than one storm system per season. It's also just weird knowing that for a tornado to hit places like Santa Monica and the knowledge that tornadoes usually travel southwest to northeast, and that there is no more land west of Santa Monica, that they are going to form as waterspouts. That's just unusual for typical experience for Tornado Alley folks.

Just another example of how one person's typical experience with storms can still be unusual when experience some place else.

Sure, my original comment was very ambiguous about what I've just posted, but that's how the tangent worked in my mind.

>mild thunderstorm

What!?! We have some doozies here in the summer. (Finger Lakes region of NY.)

We had some allright thunderstorms in MA, but I lived briefly in the Midwest and—they have these thunderstorms that are still scary even when you are inside. It is bizarre.

Agreed! Grew up in Illinois. Live in CT now. Miss those summer thunderstorms in the midwest.

i live in dallas, about 10 years ago there was a small tornado skipping up and down about 3 miles north of me (they typically move SW to NE). I got in the car to "chase" it and made it to the end of my street. It was so ominous looking I turned around and went back home.

> It was so ominous looking I turned around and went back home.

We have a word for that...smart.

I think the term you may be seeking is 'seismic event'

I cannot speak for California, but in PNW there is even less “surprising, sudden weather thingies.”

Rain is not pouring, unlike on east coast (speaking from my expeirences in both NYC and Atlanta), it is just drizzling at a very low rate. It doesnt thunderstorm. I’ve heard thunder iirc only 2-3 times in my 7 years living there. No tornados or tsunamis. No massive blizzards out of nowhere. I felt this earthquake in NYC today myself, and I remember having a similarly strong eathquake in Seattle only a couple of times.

I have no idea where this “west coast and its sudden weather thingies” take comes from (again, I cannot speak for California), but it runs counter to everything I’ve personally experienced.

I thought California had a lot of Earthquakes.

Oregon is full of volcanoes and about to slip off the continental shelf, right? But I guess those surprises just exists in potential form.

I have lived in California for something like 33 of my 36 years. I have actually felt a grand total of 3 earthquakes in my entire life. Even out here, quakes big enough to shift the wall decorations across a large portion of the state are vanishingly rare.

Uh... This is incorrect, and probably largely dependent on where exactly you live. Just go look at an earthquake swarm map of CA. Near the fault in Los Angeles have been dozens if not more of small/midsized/large quakes that could produce the effects you're talking about. I had one in my office just the other week that freaked everyone out.

I'm not saying there aren't earthquakes. I'm saying actually feeling/noticing them is extremely rare in my experience. Maybe I have just lived in exactly the right places over the years. Probably many happened when I was doing something that masked them, but nonetheless in over 30 years I have noticed just a few quakes, and only one was significant enough to leave any evidence in the form of moved objects.

> in PNW there is even less “surprising, sudden weather thingies.”

I'd put the constant wildfires in the weather thing bucket.

I've definitely seen a few "pouring rainstorms" this year where I'm at in the PNW. If you live in the Seattle area you're actually in the rain shadow of the Olympics, but when you get to about Mountlake Terrace to just south of Everett you're in a convergence zone and get all the weather that diverted around the northern half of the Olympics, so you can get a crazy amount of water there. I've also seen a LOT of rain just touring the Olympic coast(The Hoh rainforest is the wettest forest in the US), and also out on the San Juan islands and in the Bellingham area.

I've also been day hiking after work and gotten more than a few heavy rains. One of which almost gave me hypothermia because it snuck up on me while I was in the woods on top of something during one of those drizzles you're referring to.

There actually are tornados in the PNW. Both Washington and Oregon get about 1.7 per year. Here are maps of the tornados here since 1950 for Washington [1] and Oregon [2].

For Washington, in the 134 tornados since 1950 there were 6 fatalities, 303 direct injuries, and $31 million in damages. However most of that was from a single bad year, 1972, which had 4 tornados and all 6 of those fatalities, along with 301 of the 303 injuries. $25 million of the damages were from that year, too.

For Oregon it was 130 tornados since 1950, with 0 fatalities and 5 injuries. $32 million in damages. Like Washington most of the damage came from one year, 1968, with $25 million in damages.

Even though they are rare it turns out that we do have a functioning tornado warning system here. I found this out a few years when my iPhone started blaring a very loud alarm--louder than anything I'd ever heard from it before.

[1] https://datacentral.kitsapsun.com/tornado-archive/

[2] https://data.statesmanjournal.com/tornado-archive/

Louder than those about a spotted wanted honda civic?

I count fires as a form of weather in CA, would probably apply to the PNW too

> almost no surprising, sudden weather thingies

I had never been anywhere near a hurricane in my life before I moved to NYC. I thought that was just something you worried about in the Caribbean or occasionally Florida.

We do get tornados in NJ. About 3 per year.

Everything gets amplified on the East coast, any event, since much of the media we consume originates there.

The PNW does get tremendously powerful Pacific cyclones every so often [0]. These are huge storms that would do real damage to mid-Atlantic cities.

And there's the known risk of the "big one" -- subduction zone quake, Seattle fault, etc. Sleep tight East coast, you'll be fine.

[0] - https://www.climate.washington.edu/stormking/mainindex.html

I distinctly remember the first time I created a Twitter account (& probably became aware of Twitter being a thing) was the day when a similar earthquake was felt in NYC back in 2011...

Yes! It was in the fall. The epicenter of that one was near Virginia though I think.

Edit: Here it is. It was the end of August which I consider the Fall cause that's when the Fall semester starts for me ^^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Virginia_earthquake

I remember this earth quake! I missed it lol. I happened to be driving and we got out of the car to see a tv telling us how we got hit with an earth quake and my friend and I looking at one another like "what did we miss". This time I happened to be on the second floor of a small office building. I was about to run out of the building if it started to get worse I wasn't sure it wasn't the building having an issue.

I worked in northern Virginia at the time, fairly close to the epicenter.

Our office building shook violently. A poor woman I worked with was quite panicked, dove under her desk... and admonished me afterward for staying calm?

I'm in Brooklyn and felt it while on a call with an NJ resident who was the first to say "are we having an earthquake??"

Do earthquakes have a propagation speed? Might she have felt it before me?

Yes, the speed of sound (through the earth, so faster than the speed of sound in air); yes.

In California, typically usgs has earthquakes posted before I can feel them. They didn't have this one a few minutes after I felt it, so I feel like automatic earthquake detection is off in this area of the US.

Same experience -- felt a shaking; thought maybe a heavy truck had passed by for a second, then saw that all the monitors were swaying. Checked USGS and saw nothing, so figured it was nothing, because on the west coast they have the reports up lickety split. Half hour later everyone's phone started buzzing with the automated alert.

I received the earthquake alert about 45 minutes after it occurred.

The Apple alert came in at 12:05pm warning of aftershocks but not the primary event.

In the Bay Area, everyone gets an SMS message that says an earthquake is coming. I've felt/heard the shaking 10-20 seconds later.

Some industrial equipment shuts down to avoid damage.

We felt it at 10:26 am ET. And an alert was sent to everyone at 11:24 am that an earthquake is coming. And then another one alerting for possibility of aftershocks. No aftershocks felt.

They travel in waves through the rock!

Everything has a propagation speed :P, but yes she probably felt it before you, then her signal made it to you faster than the Earthquake did.

https://xkcd.com/723/

Yes. There is an excellent XKCD on the topic:

https://xkcd.com/723/

But in summary, the speed is slower than light, so yes you can find out through telecom faster than it getting to you.

The earthquake was centered in NJ.[0] Propagation speed would be a function of the depth. [1]

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/place/40%C2%B040'58.8%22N+74%C2%...

[1] https://www.britannica.com/science/seismic-wave

> Might she have felt it before me?

Surface waves yes, body waves not necessarily. But surface waves are more destructive.

The west coast states have the MyShake early warning system, which sends out automated alerts for 4.5+ quakes.

https://earthquake.ca.gov/

Same thing happened to me. I was on a facetime with someone in Brooklyn, but I was a 2 hour drive north outside of NYC and it took what felt like 30 seconds to propagate over that 200km.

Earthquakes propagate very slowly (around 2-8 miles/sec). That's how systems like ShakeAlert can send out early warning notifications. This one, for example, happened 40+ miles from NYC proper, so residents could have had like 20 seconds notice if the service operated here. People further up or down the coast could have had multiple minutes.

Do you think that earthquakes transmit instantaneously? Why would they not have a propagation speed like everything else in the universe?

I assume they meant “propagation speed that is substantially slower than light in a vacuum” since that is less than 50ms between any two points on earth.

On the earth the speed of light as is good as instantaneous.

> On the earth the speed of light as is good as instantaneous.

Frustrated network architects would disagree!

Sure given the epicenter was in NJ and closer than Brooklyn. I am from Brooklyn, but live in Nyack, NY, and I felt it here. Nyack is 40mi from epicenter, Brooklyn ~60mi. But your experience could be different based on the structure you are in, floor elevation, and existing soil and ground conditions.

People in my town in southern NH reported feeling it about 20 minutes after it happened

Yes. Last time there was a fairly large one in the SF Bay Area I happened to be on the phone with some relatives about 40 miles away and I felt an earthquake a moment before they did.

Earthquake waves have several propagation speeds, because there are different types of waves. The fastest is called the P-wave, which is a compressional (longitudinal) wave, similar to a sound wave, with a velocity of ~5-8 km/s for typical continental bedrock. The second fastest is the S-wave, or shear wave, which is about 65% of the P-wave speed. These waves produce relatively little displacement at the surface (except for close to the epicenter of large earthquakes) but are important seismologically. Then, there are the surface waves, which are caused by the interaction of the S-waves with the surface (in a way that I don't 100% understand). These travel about 90% of the S-wave speed, but they have the biggest displacements at the surface and therefore are the main ones that you feel and that cause damage.

The surface wave displacements also get amplified in wet or loose soil, so the ground shaking and seismic damage is also much greater areas on top of sediment rather than bedrock. Areas on a river, lake or coast where the land has been extended into the water by dumping fill dirt are the worst--ground shaking is really bad and they are very prone to liquefaction.

The difference between the arrival times (at any given point on earth) of the different phases of seismic waves is a function of the distance from the earthquake itself (the hypocenter) and the observation site. It is close to linear in Euclidian distance relatively near the earthquake hypocenter, but becomes more nonlinear farther from the earthquake, because the wave speeds are faster at depth (denser rock) so the travel paths of the wave fronts (the ray paths) are nonlinear. These differences in arrival times are one of the main ways of locating the hypocenter of an earthquake given observations from seismometers at multiple sites. It's essentially triangulation, except with time differences instead of angles--this is done through solving a system of equations.

Additionally, S-waves can't pass through liquids, so there is the 'S-wave shadow zone' that occupies a large fraction of the side of the earth opposite an earthquake where there are no primary S-wave arrivals--S-waves are blocked by the liquid outer core. This is how we found out that the outer core is liquid!

Early warning systems also work by detecting P and S waves as close to the epicenter as possible.

Ground liquefaction is scary. Happened in Palu, Sulawesi a while ago. You can see houses moving as if they're on wheels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_egBKj1W08

Three and a half hours later, a collective yawn from the west coast passed over the epicenter.

I felt it in Mass -- I was working on the second floor. My wife was on the ground floor and didn't feel it. From our internal slack channel, this seems fairly common -- people on the ground floor don't feel it here in MA, but higher floors, they do feel it.

Im on ground floor and definitely felt it. In brooklyn. All the buildings around me were visibly shaking. Felt like a freight train going by 10 feet away, but eerily quiet.

Felt it in Hartford, CT!

Also in MA on the second floor. Two of my roommates were standing and didn't notice it, but I definitely felt it sitting down

Felt it too outside of Boston. Thought the heat pump upstairs was having a serious malfunction.

I felt it on an upper floor of a big old brick building in Cambridge.

First thought was it was an earthquake, but then no signs other than that I could feel it in legs.

I'm in a house up in Chelmsford, north of Boston – one person on the second floor felt it.

This was my second minor quake that could be felt in Mass. I was driving both times. First time I thought my steering felt suddenly rubbery. I was in a rotary. Didn't notice this one.

I'm on the Cape, and I heard some banging around that time. I thought my wife was just being loud in the shower.

Strong vibrations in Westchester county

The marketing team at Rumble.com is really innovating these days, getting people to switch over from Youtube.

I hadn't heard of rumble yet. But after reviewing it, of course this exists...

I actually do use Rumble (there are some more controversial-but-also-left-leaning creators that got banned from YouTube that I like), but man the ads on there are insane.

COVID conspiracy theories, vaccine "alternatives", political ads for obscure Republican candidates, stuff like that. Fortunately, at least for now there's not a lot of ads (I suspect that they can't find a lot of mainstream advertisers), so generally I only got to watch one of those ads before the video starts.

I don't know - for example, here is a video of a couple of scientists who explain in detail how they have analyzed the vaccine contents and how authorities then have reacted to their complaints:

https://rumble.com/v4n6hsn-analysis-on-covid-19-vaccines-per...

Would you still call such content a conspiracy theory?

Absolutely.

The subtitles open with "so-called vaccine against COVID-19" and "with all this fraud that is which is being carried about by the WHO".

These vaccines have been seriously studied for year and now billions of people have taken them. Safe enough, ok?

I made it clear that these were the ads, not the direct videos.

That said, the COVID vaccines are safe and saying otherwise is kind of intellectually dishonest. Just because you can find one video where they "analyzed the vaccine contents" doesn't discount all the research and sampling data that has been taken.

If you haven't gotten the COVID vaccine, you probably should.

Everyone should be able to appreciate a dad joke like this... even if it was a bit shaky.

It's hard to fault someone for slipping loose everyone once in a while

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/05/earthquake-v...

Thankfully the surgeon wasn't "scalpel deep" during the quake!

M 2.0 aftershock?

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us7000ma7c...

Several aftershocks apparently:

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=40.4809,...

A number of years ago, in SoCal (where earthquakes are nothing too special), we had a similar sized quake (maybe a tad bigger). One guy from Denver was out and his eyes went big and wasn't sure what to do -- everyone else just kept talking and moved away from the big glass windows haha.

For my first quake in CA, I was peeing. (I'm a man and I pee standing up.) The shower doors next to me started to rattle, so I thought the people above me were jumping around. I didn't realize it was a quake! (The stream kept going where it was supposed to go.)

I came out of the bathroom and my roommate was terrified.

It was even funnier when my mom called me in a panic and I told her what happened.

Both me and my girlfriend were working from home today. Randomly our dog started crying and a few seconds later we felt the quake. Was pretty wild. Lots of rattling of furniture and plates in the cabinets. I guess my dog must have noticed the more subtle rumbles beforehand.

Just saw this a few days ago:

https://stationview.raspberryshake.org/

Not a ton of coverage in the area but it was picked up.

Is it possible that a larger aftershock or swarm is coming? How do these things work usually?

Last time something like this happened was 25 years ago…

https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo/news/aftershocks-swar...

USGS suggests that this was a main earthquake of a series. I guess there was one mid march

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?currentFeatureI...

    This event is identified as the potential mainshock of an earthquake sequence.

From this URL: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us7000ma74...

there WAS one follow-up so far this morning, currently being reported as a 2.0.

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us7000ma7c...

Reading this on the toilet now wondering what my priorities would be if there was a quake in the next couple minutes.

Finishing up!

That one is easy: You won’t shock anyone if you show up at the hospital with dirty underwear. You don’t want a trauma surgeon to say that they have to page the neuro-chir. Get under a doorframe, and put your pants up when your head is safe.

I thought the door frame thing was actually not a good idea? The mantra nowadays is drop, cover and hold on. Which might actually put you in a more precarious situation during said quake.

I can honestly say it happened to me. It's a very strange experience- lasted about 40 seconds. I'm about 300km from where the epicenter was. The main thing i worried about was the building collapsing, and my state of dress and 'activity' would become the stuff of memes and "did you hear about....?" stories.

I'm near epicenter, felt the foreshock a few weeks ago too: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us6000mix0...

What if this is just another foreshock?

Considering the aftershocks are way less intense, probably not. I've felt 2 now, last one was just a few minutes ago, parents confirmed (they are about same distance from epicenter but I'm northwest, they are southeast of it)

EDIT: waiting for usgs to update with latest but here's all the ones associated with event https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?currentFeatureI...

I once experienced an earthquake in Connecticut.

The weird thing was, just before it happened I heard/felt a very peculiar thrumming in my ear, like the air was exerting vibrating pressure.

They say that animals can detect earthquakes before they happen. I think I might have an idea as to how.

Didn’t even feel at all? Was in Queens, NY, strangely a couple of people around me felt it though

My building rattled for a good 15 seconds.

Same here in northern NJ just outside Manhattan. It was extremely noticeable, my cat also freaked out briefly.

4.7 is literally nothing

It’s actually “moderate shaking and light damage expected”[1] but go off sis.

(1)https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us7000ma74...

It is very obviously not "literally nothing", given the amount of people chiming in that they felt it.

> 4.7 is literally nothing

4.7 quake at 1 km depth will shake more at the surface than a 6.0 at 30 km depth

4.7 at 5km depth is still nothing for anyone not immediately above the epicenter.

East coast geology (older, harder rocks) causes earthquakes to feel about ten times stronger than a west coast earthquake. This is felt roughly the same as a 5.8 in California. That's enough to be notable, especially at a shallow depth.

I'm in Forest Hills (fifth story) and at first I thought it was the usual extreme wind we get because the windows were shaking heavily. Then it got worse and I realized what it was when I felt it through the floor.

I've felt at least one other in the last year or two here but my wife in the other room did not. This one was the strongest I've been through though.

Are you in the Kennedy?

Nope.

I felt that one too in upstate NY, more of a rumbling that anything more violent. Doesn't even come close to the one I experienced in Peru one time, where everything felt like a ship on rough seas... never want to live through that kind of quake again!

I prefer living through an earthquake than not!

I was in jersey city and our building literally shaked. It was very scary to say the least.

Curious about the 4.7 vs 4.8. Official source here says 4.8 but title says 4.7.

APNews did something similar showing 4.8 in the headline but 4.7 in the text.

Coincidentally the depth is 4.7 km. Wonder if there's just a transpose error and a lot of copy/paste.

Earthquake magnitude usually changes a bunch in the first hour or two as new data comes in.

For example some of the data comes from stations on the other side of the planet, and it takes a while for the wave to propagate that far.

That's one possible explanation, though I've been on usgs.gov a lot from the first I heard of this, and I've only ever seen 4.8 on it. Odd, also that the OP sharing this shared a link to 4.8 but put 4.7 in the title. But the text on that page might trick your eye, between "M 4.8 - 7 km N" and "Magnitude 4.8 mwr Depth 4.7 km".

Those of us in California are used to this. We feel the shake and look it up, and see one number. News articles get written with one of those numbers. After a while it changes, possibly a few times, to some number close to the initial report.

I've been watching USGS since I felt it. It was originally 4.8, then it was 4.7 for a little bit, and they brought it back up to 4.8.

That helps. I must've just missed it when it said 4.7. Most articles just state 4.7 (or 4.8) though a few are now saying "preliminary magnitude of 4.7." By the time I saw it, it said M 4.8 mwr with uncertainty ± 0.0.

Also interesting is the list of two "catalogs" with mostly similar data but very different depth reports: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us7000ma74...

Live 25 miles South West of epicenter.

It went on for I guess 30 seconds or so. Everyone in the house completely confused as we had never been in a quake before. Very low level vibrations, very very loud sound. Very foreign to New Jersey folks!

This is the second quake I've felt in Pennsylvania. The first was in 2011. I was born here and lived here for my whole life except for 4 years when I lived in CA, where I didn't feel any earthquakes.

Yeah, since I moved to Seattle in 2011 there have been two largeish quakes in the northeast. I have yet to feel one in Seattle.

Of course now I've jinxed myself.

That was fun. My folks place is essentially a 5 minute drive from the epicenter. I'm about an hours drive. Our experience was pretty similar.

Looks like reported depth was 5km, making this a very shallow earthquake

I was laying in bed and thought I'd sleep a little bit more. the earthquake wasn't violent, but certainly noticeable. It was similar to someone walking on my roof, without the banging.

I thought a tree fell on the house. It was loud. We occasionally get branches that make a bang on the roof.

I’m about 15 miles from the epicenter.

Japan, Taiwan, New York, this is apparently the year of the earthquake.

4.7 is not really a strong earthquake, it s routine in earthquake-prone zones

> 4.7 is not really a strong earthquake, it s routine in earthquake-prone zones

NYC quake was at shallow depth.

4.7 quake at 1 km depth will shake more at the surface than a 6.0 at 30 km depth

In this case, it's a 4.8 mwr at 4.7 km depth.

USGS shows it as 4.8 at 4.7 km

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?currentFeatureI...

The Belden quake is 4.4 at 7.8 km, and 4.2 at 5 km.

It's a log scale so the Whitehouse quake is much larger, but the significance of the quake seems to be more than just these numbers because Belden quake is irrelevant (didn't make the news really).

Sarupathar was a 5.8 (huge comparatively) at 10 km. Hualien was 5.1 at 15.9 km and talked about more than Sarupathar. So the defining aspect appears to be how many people are within range of the epicenter rather than just raw depth and magnitude. Which makes sense, I suppose. We care about how population centers encounter the movement!

> Hualien was 5.1 at 15.9 km

That's just an aftershock.

The main quake was three days ago. M 7.4 according to USGS: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us7000m9g4...

So for an earthquake that's almost 1000x as strong, you'd think it'd be talked about more.

Thank you! Yeah, a 7.4 is humongous. I did wonder about this because my wife's family reported quite intensive shaking and I've been in a 6-something before and that was quite disruptive. I can't imagine a 5.1 being that much.

The hurricanes are coming soon. Oceans are warming up at record speeds this year already.

Dogs and Cats Living together.

Solar eclipses, even!

Fire and brimstone!

Sharknadoes

Locusts (or at least Cicadas)!

First time I see a .gov entity use metric system only (not even “x km (y miles)”.

> Since 1950, 40 other earthquakes of magnitude 3 and larger have occurred within 250 km of today’s earthquake

I experienced a 4.8 earthquake about a month ago in Tokyo, and noticed the shaking significantly. In Manhattan this morning, I didn't notice the 4.7 earthquake at all.

How common is East coast earthquak

very rare

I've lived on the east coast for 25 years and experienced 2 that were noticeable.

I lived there for the first 23 years of life and experienced zero. I felt left out when I missed the 2011 one.

Pretty common, but small and rarely noticed [0]. Probably lots of construction and geotechnical engineering wouldn't have survived anything significant at least in the Northeast

    [0]  https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=38.03944,-79.33228&extent=45.75219,-63.86353&range=search&showUSFaults=true&baseLayer=terrain&timeZone=utc&search=%7B%22name%22:%22Search%20Results%22,%22params%22:%7B%22starttime%22:%221900-01-01%2000:00:00%22,%22maxlatitude%22:42.816,%22minlatitude%22:41.2,%22maxlongitude%22:-69.593,%22minlongitude%22:-73.592,%22minmagnitude%22:0,%22orderby%22:%22time%22%7D%7D

It is very uncommon that they are very strong, but they can be rather severe when a big one occurs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1886_Charleston_earthquake

I'm in Manhattan (UWS) and live on the fourth floor of a five story walk-up. I felt the quake, but didn't realize that's what it was (I was a little confused as to why my building was vibrating -- for 40 seconds or so, as big trucks can do that but not for that long) until I received an emergency alert on my phone ~45 minutes later.

Nothing broken or dislodged, just wondering why my building was vibrating fairly gently.

We're almost exactly 10 miles north of the epicenter near Oldwick, NJ. We experienced several sharp jolts that sent some items tumbling off shelves and shook my ember full of coffee off its charging coaster (or I spilled it in reacting to the jolt, idk really), followed by a gentle shaking that lasted 30 seconds or more. This is the first one I can recall feeling since we moved here in 1995.

5 km depth. That's of concern. Will shake a small region more violently than what a normal mag 4+ quake would have.

Is that deeper or shallower than usual?

Shallower than usual. Very shallow quakes happen at 10 km to 20 km depth. This one is at 5 km.

I felt in here on Long Island, where I grew up, and am visiting from California, where I’ve lived for decades

Right now in Huntington

Earthquakes are apparently rare on the East coast. We had a 4.8/4.9 here near the census designated place of Belden in Plumas County CA yesterday evening. Others farther away felt it. I didn’t. Cats didn’t react either. Unless it’s a sharp quake, or in the mid 5s, I mostly don’t notice them.

Felt this all the way in Brooklyn. My wife and I thought it was just some heavy sustained road construction nearby; it was a bit shakier than usual for that, but the last thing we thought it was was an actual earthquake.

Fortunately, at least in our area, there doesn't appear to be any kind of damage.

Yep - felt it here in northern NJ, as did friends in NY and CT.

Working from home - all windows rattling/etc - first thought something was happening inside house, then looked outside expecting something massive driving by perhaps!

Kids at high school did classroom emergency shelter-in-place.

I’m about 10mi from the epicenter and noticed most of the aftershocks today. What’s interesting is there was a 2.2 a couple weeks ago at the same area and I thought I noticed it, but didn’t look it up at the time thinking it was just a truck nearby.

4.7 an earthquake? Here in Chile thats more like a simple tremor, we dont even feel those.

Chilean reaction to an earthquake:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5MW1HiuqpM

Keep in mind that Chilean building regulations account for much more seismic activity than the ones on the US East Coast.

Our 4.0 earthquake in Youngstown, OH where there are NEVER earthquakes was caused by high pressure pumping of radioactive fracking waste fluids from the Marcellus shale play in Pennsylvania into the Northstar 1 Injection Well

In NYC. This was much stronger than in terms of local shaking than the others of the last 25 years. Living on the 4th floor of a 90+ year old building. My fridge was trying to walk across the floor.

Were you always on the 4th floor for the others?

You would feel it more the higher up you are as the building resonates.

The last larger one in, iirc, 2011 I was. Same apt. Definitely stronger.

I felt that (I live on Long Island).

I thought it was construction vehicles. We've had a lot of heavy construction around here.

What made it clear it was different, was my cat didn't like it, and he ignores the construction.

Speaking of cats and earthquakes, I just watched:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ-p9qOhBv4

...again. This is a Cat Cafe in Japan, and you can clearly see the cats get alerted to something ~10 seconds before the shaking starts. Do we have an idea of what they are reacting to?

Huh. You do hear about animals reacting before earthquakes. My cat did alert before the quake, but didn't really scoot, until the shaking started.

He was sitting on my lap, at the time. I'm glad he didn't extend his claws.

I suspect some kind of subsonics that come before the shaking really gets going. It can take a bit of time to get a rhythm going, so the earthquake may actually be under way for a bit, before we really feel it.

They are feeling the p-wave, which arrives just before the s-wave that you feel as shaking: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/ask-s...

I felt it on Long Island over 100 miles away. I had headphones on and thought a really heavy truck was shaking the ground. It was enough to make my desk and monitors shake but nothing too crazy.

I live about 20 miles from the epicenter and my neighbors said that their mirrors were shaking and monitors were wobbling. I felt nothing, at all, and my cats didn't move an inch.

I'm pretty observant with that sort of thing, so I'm a bit surprised.

Is it even possible for someone a few houses away to experience drastically different seismic activity?

Edit: I was on the ground floor, which is likely why I did not feel it.

If my eyes were closed I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between it and a washing machine running on a floor below you. I really only noticed it because my monitors were wobbling a decent amount.

> Is it even possible for someone a few houses away to experience drastically different seismic activity?

I'm not sure but there's probably variables around how sturdy things are (the foundation, floor, walls, desk, monitors, etc.). If I tap the side of my desk with the force of a golf clap the monitor wobble factor it about equal to the earthquake. I know in the US it's funny to measure things with weird units but that's the best I can do to associate the amount of force.

I was at a desk which also has a bunch of my wife's art supplies on it. That stuff definitely would have moved.

Felt it in western philly suburbs near valley forge. My roof was shaking but it was weird, thought it was a helicopter overhead. Didn't even realize it was a quake. Over in seconds.

In Connecticut - rattled the windows and shook books off the bookcase.

Felt it in Southwest CT for a solid 15-20 seconds. Definitely thought it was a very large truck going by, but also felt like our solar panels were falling off the roof.

Didn't feel it at all in central CT. My brother in northern NJ said he was briefly evacuated from his building.

I was at the Port Authority terminal and felt nothing. My wife was in Long Island city and felt it strongly enough to text me. Crazy shit.

TIL that part of the world is seismically active. No idea why I thought it wasn't. Funny gap in knowledge there! Hope folks are ok.

I legit slept through this?? Had to take an ambien last night because of my insomnia. Who knew insomnia could potentially be fatal?

I got alert after 10 mins of earthquake .....:(

Yeah I found that pretty strange. I felt the earthquake, and searched Google for "earthquake nyc" results in the last hour - found nothing.

10 or 20 minutes later my phone starts buzzing informing me that there had been an earthquake. Seems rather pointless.

I think the alert is to try to get people to stop calling the police to ask/inform them about what they felt.

Phone alert came here 1hr40min after the quake. [shrug] yes pretty useless

My father is a very light sleeper. During my childhood in NYC, more than once an earthquake woke him up.

Lots of “was that an earthquake”? discussion in r/somerville (MA)

My apartment in williamsburg was violently shaking for like 2 minutes

I think i remember someone telling me when i was living in nyc that your area foundations are a lot of clay. That would probably amplify the sensation of a quake.

What are the chances this was a cascade of the taiwan earthquake?

Central New York here...I was in a basement and missed it :/

I ran out because I thought the boiler was going to go kaboom.

Which fault caused it?

Northeastern US quakes are typically the result of post-glacial uplift. The land is still rising and stress builds up over time.

Likely Ramapo, but what do I know.

I didn't stay at a holiday in last night, but I can read maps and it does seem like this one landed on the Ramapo fault line.

there's a good general description of seismicity in the region here:

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us7000ma74...

Felt a slight shake. House was unaffected however.

way to go Frank https://ssgeos.org/

well, potential regions do not include east coast US at all.

yeah I bet it’s impossible to forecast location very easily because of how complex and unpredictable the actual plates and crust of the earth might be, but it’s cool to track when the forces would be compounding due to alignments of these massive bodies

a couple of east coast people on my team (NYC) felt it this morning. they were pretty excited about it haha

Felt it and I’m in MA. Boston area.

Holy shit what a ride!

Sitting at home in my office in Ozone Park NYC and I hear what I think is a low flying plane coming in to JFK. Happens when weather is bad and they come in lower they can rattle my windows. But the intensity grew suddenly and my entire house was shaking and everything was rattling.

At first I froze for a few seconds as I could not make sense of what I was experiencing - but it was clear this was not normal so I ran like hell downstairs and outside. While running I was trying to make sense of the shaking: did a truck or plane crash? no not this long - maybe the elevated A train up the block is collapsing? An explosion? some kind of cataclysm? WTF is happening! But after I reached the side door and the house was still shaking I realized this is an earthquake. Earthquake was not the first thing on my mind for sure as I have lived in NYC all my life and never felt anything like this.

Fucking nuts

Thanks for the exciting first person account.

I've never been in an earthquake it's got to be such a strange thing to experience the first time.

Hearing tornado sirens for the first time was wild, especially as a Silent Hill fan.

On the other hand my friend moved to Brooklyn from Haiti after their terrible quake so he's in a mood right now.

A number of decades ago I took a trip out to California for the first time and we had reached our friends house pretty late. After driving for 12+ hours straight I passed out on the floor.

In the middle of the night I was awoken by what I thought was a large truck out front, like a garbage truck or something. But it kept getting closer and more intense and everything started shuffling around in the house with a shik-shik-shik-shik noise and the blinds started rapping off each side of the window sill. When you experience something new like this where your brain kind of spins around in circles not knowing what to do, then it came back with the answer of Earthquake! which I involuntarily yelled out loud. My next thought was "Is this going to get worse, and what do I do if it does". I was in a new place that I had barely even looked at before falling asleep. Thankfully it subsided after 20 seconds or so without any major incident. Was hard to fall back to sleep that night.

My only earthquake experience was also in NYC. In the 80's I was awakened by what can only be described as feeling as if someone had picked up the entire apartment building a couple inches and dropped it. Sudden and severe and over in a second or two.

Early morning on a weekday in 1985?

Yeah, I slept through that.

when all the fracking quakes were happening a while back i felt one in Dallas. I was sitting outside at a coffeshop working. It felt like a big truck drove by but when i looked up there was no traffic at all. very strange sensation.

> At first I froze for a few seconds as I could not make sense of what I was experiencing

i hate that feeling, a few weeks ago i was walking my dogs and surprised by a pitbill and some other mix that immediately attacked my two small dogs. It took like 5-10 seconds for me to even figure out what was happening and what to do about it.

Unless familiar with such situations you can't react to them - especially when it's a total surprise with violence or a threatening situation (like your house shaking). Next time we should be able to react faster because of these experiences.

I'd like to add that when we had an aftershock at ~6PM EST I immediately reacted to it. At that point I knew it was a quake and did not hesitate to get up. Of course it was not a big deal and was over before I could get a glass of water.

I felt it in Delaware!

Was it a Bruce Springsteen concert?

Also, do we know if Bruce Springsteen is okay?

It's now 7 km NNE of Whitehouse Station, New Jersey, according to the linked page

Thanks, I edited while I still could.

This makes it sound like the earthquake is ongoing and moving.

For all our sakes, I hope that’s not the case.

40 such earthquakes happen daily in the world. So?

We don’t get this kind of stuff in the Northeast and it is a relatively population-dense area of the US. Also it is sort of the news center of the country.

Earthquakes are not evenly distributed, and quite rare in New England.

For those of you who didn't grow up in earthquake country, some tips:

DO NOT get into a doorway, that's a myth. It's not a terrible place to be if it's a doorless frame, but if there is a door, it's more likely you get injured from the door smacking you than the earthquake.

DO get under a strong table. That's the safest place to be in a quake if it happens when you are indoors.

If you're outside get as far away from trees and power lines as possible (and glass), but if the ground is shaking too hard to maintain balance, stay in place. Again, you're more likely to get injured falling down than from whatever may be nearby.

If you're inside and not near a table, at the very least cover your head if possible and move away from bookcases and other tall or top heavy objects.

Also, if you did feel it, please help the USGS study earthquakes by filling out a Did You Feel it survey: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us7000ma74...

I suppose depending on the structure and the individual's inclination strong table might be a good call.

But in my single family home situation it really doesn't take more than a few seconds and I can be out the door provided I'm not knocked off my feet entirely type situation.

Being out the door is usually riskier than being inside a wood-frame SFH. You're exposed to falling trees, branches, power lines, and roof debris, as well as unsecured cars or other loose items. Wood-framed 1-2 story SFHs almost never collapse in an earthquake; the wood can bend to absorb the shock, and there's a lot of redundancy in the studs, and not a whole lot of weight on floors above you.

I guess I'm fortunate / unfortunate that my outdoors ... doesn't have a lot of that.

It might be interesting to somehow determine earthquake injuries / ability to get in or outdoors and measure the real risk from actual events.

You really shouldn't run out the door during and immediately after (as in, as soon as it seems to have stopped) large earthquakes. The building, structurally, will most likely be fine (unless it's a truly massive one in an area that doesn't get massive earthquakes normally), however the facade and whatever else is on the outside of the building probably won't be. Think roof shingles, billboards, windows, planter boxes, trees, powerlines, antennae...

Plus you'd be surprised how hard it is to even stand straight during particularly strong quakes yet alone walk/run, there's no possible description I can give to explain adequately how strange it is to feel the ground underneath your feet shaking violently, especially in buildings.

The standard advice now taught in California schools is "Duck, cover, hold." Basically everything that parent poster said, but in a pithy 3-word aphorism you're more likely to remember.

Sure, but at some point, you have to be told what "duck, cover, hold" actually means. Your comment as the first comment someone hears is like a news article using acronyms throughout the article without ever expanding the acronym.

It’s the first thing we teach new arrivals to California along with “stop, drop, and toll” and what real Mexican food tastes like.

> “stop, drop, and toll”

In California, even saving yourself from being on fire is taxed.

Guys, calm down, it is actually an ok pun joke. “Toll”, get it?

I didn't think this would get hate rofl

I don’t know why you got downvoted. I liked the joke!

I guess my fellow Californians can be a little touchy about taxes.

It's relatively self-explanatory. The full expansion would be "Duck under a table or other rigid object. Cover your head. Hold on."

Yeah no, unless someone has previously told you what it means there's no way of guessing that, that's just wishful thinking.

I bet you’ll remember it now though :)

It really isn't for anyone whose native language is American English. Unless you plan to quack, while singing a Mariah Carey song, and waiting to speak to customer service rep instead.

Even more self-explanatory is "Duck into the bathroom. Cover the toilet seat with toilet paper. Hold your bladder until you're on the toilet."

I'm still not sure what I'm supposed to be holding onto. Do I briefly cover my head with my arms, then stop covering my head to hold onto the table? Do I hold onto my head while I cover it? Do I cover my loved one's head and they cover mine, sharing our last moments in a loving hold?

Now I'm beginning to wonder if I made a massive assumption that I would be covering my head with my hands. That's what I would do during a tornado, but maybe I'm supposed to be covering my head with a blanket so my hands are free for the hold on part?

Honestly, my facetious hold my bladder advice seems more apropos than anything I've managed to come up with for part three.

It's:

DROP or DUCK down to your hands and knees

Take COVER protecting your head/neck with an arm and crawl under a sturdy table/desk possible or to a nearby interior wall away from potential falling objects

HOLD ON to your shelter if you have it or head/neck with both hands if you don't

It's not as obvious as stop, drop and roll which is why drills are a thing in schools.

It's also not terribly far from duck and cover drills for nukes or tornadoes as I understand it. The hold on bit was added to keep people from tripping and breaking a leg while running around while the ground is shaking.

What a strange comment - I strongly doubt that schools are teaching that phrase without simultaneously expanding on what the phrase means. Introduce the phrase, explain it at the deeper level, then move forward with using the phrase once the students have been taught its deeper meaning. Why flippantly assume that that's not being done?

I grew up on the west coast and that's exactly how it was taught to us in public schools.

Midwest and we have a similar process for tornadoes.. and nuclear bombs.

Another hot tip.

The weak ones don’t prepare you for the strong ones.

I’ve been rocking and rolling in So Cal for decades. I’ve felt most of the major quakes that have made the news. I’ve seen stuff fall from my walls, transformers short out and explode. Felt rollers, thumpers, shakers.

We’ve had four of note at my house this year alone so far. One of them felt like it picked the house up and dropped it several inches.

Each time, they were never severe enough to get me to dive for anything. It’s just like that dinner scene in LA Story, where they just grab their glasses and carry on.

Then, you see videos of “real quakes”. Stuff out of movies. File cabinets sliding across the floor. Bookcases falling. Heavy things tossed like they weigh nothing, not to mention the larger damage.

Having been through my series of quakes, I can see they’re nothing like a major one. But, right now, my gumption when one shows up is wait and see. Perhaps not the best habit. But when you’re in bed at night, and a small roller hits and it feels like you just dropped a quarter in the slot to turn your bed on, hard to get motivated to get up and out and duck and cover.

Better just to roll over, say “it’s ok honey” to my wife, and go back to sleep.

You forgot the advice of "don't run outside from a building." In the US, most buildings are going to be fine structurally; however, the facade of the building or glass, etc., may fall off.

In other parts of the world, it'll depend on the local building codes and their enforcement.

The scaffolding-covered sidewalks in front of many buildings in NYC are a good reminder of that actually. I wouldn't trust the scaffolding to protect me if major parts of a building were to fall off in an earthquake however...

Sorry guys, that was me doing a git rebase

Spit out my tea thanks lmao

    $ git config --global alias.subduct rebase

Found the google engineer!

skill issue

Show us your failed 3D prints!

Well tuned 3d printers are somewhat surprisingly mostly unaffected by earthquakes. People have even done stuff like hanging a printer and printing without any significant issue. It'd just show as a slight imperfection on that specific line.

Makes sense, as long as the force creating the vibration is acting on both the extruder and the bed so they don't move relative to one another it shouldn't really matter.

Was on a call with my boss reluctantly explaining how kubernetes works. I felt the rumble, thinking it was just my discomfort with the state of affairs in my company. Might as well have been a fart in the wind.

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