Shake, rattle and go back to bed

[bugshaw]

Woah! An earthquake! In Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England! I must gather my possessions and prepare for the end times start up my laptop and blog it from the comfort of my bed!

Around 1 am, there were around 5 shakes, strong enough to rattle the windows and shake the heaps of books. I don't know if I'd've woken for it if I had been fully asleep (my childhood home in London shook more than that every time a goods train went underneath it). I presume it was an earthquake: at any rate I looked out of the window and couldn't see any giant lizards stomping down Newmarket Road.

Hmm. Happisburgh (village in Norfolk suffering coastal erosion) may not have appreciated having its cliffs shaken.

Comments

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Yes, earthquake, felt it here, it's the talk of the insomniac war frigate on Puzzle Pirates... I was worried it was the house settling; I'm quite glad it was an earthquake. Nothing rattling here; BBC says epicentre was west midlands

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

I think earthquake-shaken buildings have a particular frequency and characteristic side-to-side action, compared to buildings shaking because of wind or heavy passing lizards vehicles or subsidence.

But I could be completely wrong :-) This theory is based on my subjective experience in wobbly buildings.

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

Oh that's what that shaking was. I hadn't thought it might be an earthquake and was very puzzled.

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

Here, have an epicentre

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

Grr. The Eee's small screen does not handle navigating maps.google.com at all well. It cuts the map window in half, which cuts off some of the navigation buttons.

[cynthia1960.livejournal.com]

This Californian wants to know the magnitude so that I can commiserate in solidarity.

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

4.8

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

Purveyor of news before it's broken! How do you do this?

[aardvark179.livejournal.com]

The epicentre Google maps location I linked to includes the magnitude data. :-) Somebody else sent me the link.

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

Ah - that'll be one of the bits that got cut off :-)

[cynthia1960.livejournal.com]

That's enough to startle people here. Hope folks in those towns are all right.

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

Breaking news says: "we dunno yet."

It was an itty bitty thing - feel free to point and laugh :-)

[cynthia1960.livejournal.com]

Nope, not gonna do that. You don't build your buildings for seismic safety (remember Folkestone last year?), so something that might knock cans off the shelf in the grocery store but not much else here could mess you up more.

[alex-holden.livejournal.com]

It said on the radio just now that a few chimneys fell down and one chap had a chimney fall on his leg.

It woke my parents and a couple of pictures fell off the wall, but I slept right through it.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

mm, woke me too. briefly.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I heard a bang (which I hope isn't going to turn out to be bad news, but so far I haven't spotted anything) and the room shook three or four times. Since I live next to the main railway line into Paddington I assumed it was a train revving its engines, which has a similar effect though with higher frequency. But I couldn't hear a train, so I chalked it up as traffic or something until I heard the news this morning,

[sharikkamur.livejournal.com]

Damn, missed it!

You're having all the fun. I come up here to Iceland, expecting lots of fun things like volcanoes and earthquakes and what do I get in the past three and a half years? A single 5.5* and a pathetic excuse for a sub-glacial volcanic eruption. Bah. I'm definitely jealous.

*Actually we have quite a lot of smaller ones but we don't tend to notice them

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

So that's what it was. I was woken by what felt like a jolt to the building at around 1, vaguely wondered if it was a sudden gust of wind, although that didn't seem likely, then nodded off again. Some earthquake story that will make...

[anef.livejournal.com]

We slept right through it - Michael is extremely disappointed!

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

That reminds me, I should go see Cloverfield.

[muninnhuginn]

Looby Loo was very disappointed not to see cracks across the road which according to her is what always happens with earthquakes. Maybe there was a great rift down the road and all the lizards fell in it?

The house shook rather less than the middle of the night goods trains cause it to and with less falling of plaster, too.