derek derek derek

I was awoken at about 4:40am this morning to what I thought was my wife having a seizure.  She thought the same thing, only about me.  We quickly realized that we were neither to blame for the shaking of our bed, as we heard a deep rumble and some parts of the house making noise.  The inner garage door was the loudest: bap bap bap bap bap bap!  Living where we do, my thoughts went immediately to a tornado, but it wasn’t a roaring train sound, it was more like a large truck.  That’s when I realized that the shaking and noises were rhythmic, the bed feeling more like it was quickly swaying between two points on a sine wave.

This analysis all took fractions of a second, so for the other 15-20 seconds we just sat in bed in awe as the quake played itself out.  Was this a prelude to a New Madrid fault event that we’ve been warned about since we were schoolchildren?  Was it the event itself, and should I hop up and get dressed and gather our emergency supplies?  Much drama in ones head when one is awaken at such an early hour by shaking.  The moment it was over, I did what any respectable geek would do, I Googled for the USGS seismology site, which I know has realtime mapping of quakes all around the world.  I suppose the data was collected in real time, but after waiting about 5 minutes, there was still no dot on the map anywhere around us indicating seismic activity.  Back to bed I went.

When I woke up to start my day I fully expected to see a dot marked somewhere southwest of us in the New Madrid fault line, where minor tremors have occurred in my lifetime (though never strong enough that I felt them).  The Associated Press reports, as does Reuters, that it was a 5.4 magnitude, but the USGS site did finally update, categorizing it as a 5.2, with its epicenter about 90 miles northeast of us.  So, not connected with the New Madrid faultline at all, it was a quake in the Illinois basin - Ozark dome region.  Weird.

It wasn’t damaging at all - nothing fell off of shelves, no structural damage here (nor reported at locations closer to the epicenter that I know of), but it did certainly get me thinking about what we would do in the case of a New Madrid fault event, which is still predicted anywhere in the next 50 years, with a possible magnitude as high as 8.0.  Because of the inner continental geology such a quake, like its predecessor in 1812, would be felt and have the capacity to cause devastation all the way to the east coast and the Rockies.