Before moving to California I always wondered (or worried would be more to the point) two things about earthquakes and those two things are as follows:
- The important one, "What does it feel like to be in an earthquake?"
- How do they measure the size of it?
Well the first one took about 4 months for me to learn after I moved here or so I thought. One Sunday night I was brushing my teeth when the whole house had a violent jolt, that was a 4.1 magnitude quake. So me being me I thought "Ahh no big deal I can live with that!" How wrong was I. About a month later a 7.1 magnitude thundered it's way through the house like a freight train. Now that was an earthquake and for the two weeks following it I could shower in about 30 seconds, for some reason that was the place that scared me the most to be caught in an earthquake. Until you have experienced the violence and power of the whole world around you shaking you have no idea how it feels.
The second point took a while longer for me to discover and it happened purely by accident while we were out looking for potential radio sites. On a hilltop in Joshua Tree National Park stood a tripod with a dome shaped object on top of it and some other equipment. This turned out to be one of the many earthquake measuring sites located all across California. The photograph above shows one of these such sites in Joshua Tree. For more earthquake information with real time shake map, check out the USGS Southern California web site. Click on the photo for a larger version.