Just as we have all begun to settle back into normality and enjoying family life back in Rhode Island, along comes the first significant earthquake tremor to hit the area since 1976!
From limited research it would appear such tremors have been reported in New England, five times in the last 50 years, 1976, 1967, 1966, 1965 and 1963. Now a note of confession here, nether Laura or I felt the tremor.
I was out buying a sandwich for my lunch, apparently when your stood on the ground, in the street your less likely to feel the ground shake. So you can understand my surprise when I returned to my office to discover all my colleagues asking each other if they had felt it, apparently the building swayed for a good 30 seconds.
Laura who was is in the apartment, was also unaware when I emailed her to see if she had felt anything, I guess if nothing its pleasing to know that a quake which measures 5.8 and has its epicenter a mere 558 miles away, has no impact on the building we live in.
This is not the first the earthquake we have experienced as a family. In April 2009 we were visiting Laura's parents in Rome when the Perugia earthquake occurred, this measured 6.1 on the richter scale* and we were only 113 miles from the epicenter.
Now I have to confess at first I didn't think it was an earthquake, the previous night Aila (15 months old at the time) had fallen out of our bed, on the night of the quake, I merely thought she had climbed in again, only to fall out for the second night on the trot!
Muswell
* I was intrigued as to whom the scales name had been named, after all, these always are! It dates from Charles Richter who developed the scale in 1935 in partnership with Beno Gutenberg. Further explanation below.
From limited research it would appear such tremors have been reported in New England, five times in the last 50 years, 1976, 1967, 1966, 1965 and 1963. Now a note of confession here, nether Laura or I felt the tremor.
I was out buying a sandwich for my lunch, apparently when your stood on the ground, in the street your less likely to feel the ground shake. So you can understand my surprise when I returned to my office to discover all my colleagues asking each other if they had felt it, apparently the building swayed for a good 30 seconds.
Laura who was is in the apartment, was also unaware when I emailed her to see if she had felt anything, I guess if nothing its pleasing to know that a quake which measures 5.8 and has its epicenter a mere 558 miles away, has no impact on the building we live in.
This is not the first the earthquake we have experienced as a family. In April 2009 we were visiting Laura's parents in Rome when the Perugia earthquake occurred, this measured 6.1 on the richter scale* and we were only 113 miles from the epicenter.
Now I have to confess at first I didn't think it was an earthquake, the previous night Aila (15 months old at the time) had fallen out of our bed, on the night of the quake, I merely thought she had climbed in again, only to fall out for the second night on the trot!
Muswell
* I was intrigued as to whom the scales name had been named, after all, these always are! It dates from Charles Richter who developed the scale in 1935 in partnership with Beno Gutenberg. Further explanation below.
The expression Richter magnitude scale refers to a number of ways to assign a single number to quantify the energy contained in an earthquake.
In all cases, the magnitude is a base-10 logarithmic scale obtained by calculating the logarithm of the amplitude of waves measured by a seismograph. An earthquake that measures 5.0 on the Richter scale has a shaking amplitude 10 times larger than one that measures 4.0.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale
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