Whole lotta shakin' goin' on...

[DRoseDARs]

Over the past few days, we've been having a whole slew of minor earthquakes here in the Reno/Truckee/Lake Tahoe area. We just had a (initial estimate) 5.0 about 30 minutes ago. Yesterday I felt one of the two +4's that hit in the late afternoon and there have been a few 3's, all separate events. There's been a bazillion 1's and 2's aftershocks as well.

This list is updated every few minutes, so the ones I'm talking about won't be shown for very long before they're eventually replaced by newer ones (all times in UTC aka GMT):

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsus/Maps/US2/38.40.-121.-119_eqs.php

Here's the now-called 4.9 we just had:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsus/Quakes/nn00242527.php

This area is geologically active, but this is fairly unusually for us to have a cluster.

[DRoseDARs]

So it seems this cluster has been going on since February. And I just found out that there's such a thing as foreshocks which get stronger and could portend to a larger quake, unlike the usual aftershocks that get weaker after the primary event. I knew that applies to volcanoes and calderas, but could we be dealing with that here, being a geothermal area and all?

Anyhoo, while I generally don't react much to quakes, this one actually got me to a doorway since the shaking continued for longer than I was comfortable with ('bout 20-30 seconds; hard to be sure as I wasn't looking at my watch).

[DRoseDARs]

Hmm, they've downgraded the 4.9 to a 3.2. Bullsh*t that was a 3, it shook more than the 4 I felt yesterday sitting in the same spot.

[Lancer]

There's been more than 600 small quakes off the Oregon Coast recently.

[Lancer]

http://blog.oregonlive.com/breakingnews/2008/04/quakes_continue_off_oregon_coa.html

Here's the full story.

[DRoseDARs]

Now there was a 3.5 ten minutes ago. I thought I heard something. our two-story home is half-buried in a hillside. There's a concrete wall 3 feet in front of me as I type keeping the dirt out. If you don't hear from me for a while, bring shovels...

[DRoseDARs]

And now our 4.9 down to a 3.2 is back up to a 4.7. Damn right.

[DRoseDARs]

Lancer, that's gotta be obnoxious, especially during sex. In Soviet Oregon, you don't rock her world, world rocks YOU.

[Frozzy]

Lots of small earthquakes are good.

[DRoseDARs]

Problem is cluster quakes can indicate a much larger quake is coming and soonish; smaller quakes in a given area don't necessarily relieve stress along a fault line.

[Frozzy]

Originally posted by DRoseDARs
Problem is cluster quakes can indicate a much larger quake is coming and soonish; smaller quakes in a given area don't necessarily relieve stress along a fault line.

Oh well, grow a pair or buy a church and pray.

[DRoseDARs]

Originally posted by Frozzy


Oh well, grow a pair or buy a church and pray.

...

I generally don't react much to quakes

Do we have a middle finger smiley?

[Frozzy]

Originally posted by DRoseDARs


...



Do we have a middle finger smiley?

What difference does it make... certainly triple posting twice over a 4.7 earthquake isn't gonna increase your chances of survival if there's a bigger one around the corner.

[Winston]

If this goes on much longer, don't blame a guy for becoming nostalgic about chegitz guevara's eternal storm reports, not to mention his close-but-no-storm reports.

[DRoseDARs]

The forum was dead, I was bored, gave people something to talk about. Personally, I enjoy earthquakes when they're reasonable small (4-5 range), but I'm in the lower story of a 2-story +40 yr-old wood frame house. Hearing her creak under the strain tends to make me cautious as I enjoy the rest of the ride.