Small Earthquake

Jen and I were eating supper tonight when we heard quite a loud noise, almost like 10-12 snowplows all scraping the road at once. At first I thought it was a problem with our heating system, but it was soon apparent that it wasn’t.

We went to the Natural Resources Canada earthquake site and looked at some data. That graph makes it obvious that there was a disturbance at exactly the right time: 8:40 pm EST (1:40 am UTC).

An hour later, their friendly geographical maps have still not been updated, nor has their text listing been. Despite this, the US Geological Survey has accurate information on their site, along with a map, and historical and geographical information about the event and region.

I think it’s pretty pathetic that the US government has better and faster information on our tectonic activity than we do.

Ottawa is in a seismic zone, and there is a 10% chance that in the next 50 years we will feel an earthquake that causes mild to moderate damage to buildings (according to government information on earthquakes here). On average every three years we have an earthquake that is felt indoors by many people.

The event was interesting to me because of a manifestation of some of my anxiety and panic attacks in the last year. I woke up a few times thinking that there had been an earthquake, but there wasn’t. Shortly after moving into the new place I had weird sensations lying down where I felt like I was being gently pushed back and forth (head to toe). This type of hallucination of movement is sometimes called linear vertigo. I didn’t feel that panicky during most of these strange episodes, more excited than panicky I guess. I guess I kind of like earthquakes.

The sites I linked to, above, helped me to understand that there really was no earthquake going on during these hallucinations, but it’s interesting to compare my experiences then with the earthquake tonight. Tonight there was a lot of noise. The house itself was rattling. Despite this there was very little sense of actual motion. Based on the experience of tonight, there is no way that I could possibly have been experiencing a real earthquake because the motion was much much more, but with no noise whatsoever. Mental note: in future if experiencing motion with no noise, it is not motion.

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