I’m curious with the quake in Nepal. Do strong earthquakes cause physical pain? Obviously things hitting and falling on people would be painful, but I mean the force of the quake itself. Does the tumult of the ground injure people’s feet or their body if they are laying down and bruise their skin? Do the shock waves damage tissue the way a bomb would and tear off limbs and break bones?
Does the noise blow out people’s eardrums? Or is the whole thing scary but physically painless unless someone has the misfortune of getting pummeled by jetsam or buried/crushed by the ceiling above them?
No pain, just shaking. People sometime think the shaking was caused by a large truck going by. It’s a similar sensation. I felt the Loma Prieta earthquake (6.9) and many other smaller quakes, and they’ve never been painful, just scary and unsettling. Of course if the building you are in collapses, or something falls on you, it’s a different story.
I was in the 6.7 Northridge earthquake, and it was loud but not eardrum shattering. The floor was jumping so much I couldn’t stay on my feet, but it wasn’t painful.
I was 40-ish miles from the center for that one. The shaking woke me up, and I’ve slept through many others. The only noise I heard was our house creaking as it swayed. And the splashing noise of the 1+ foot waves sloshing back and forth in our backyard swimming pool. It sloshed about 2 feet of water out one end or the other.
OP: No, earthquakes aren’t painful unless you get swallowed in a crack or have a building dropped on you.
I lived in Southern California for quite a few years and experienced a few earthquakes, including the 2010 Baja California earthquake that measured in at a 7.2, and it knocked me off of my feet when I tried to stand up out of my chair, but it wasn’t painful at all. The closest thing I could compare it to is trying to stand in a bouncy castle full of kids.
I seem to have just missed one big earthquake after another. I must be charmed or something.
Just a year or two after I graduated high school, I left the San Fernando Valley area and went to college at Berkeley – then the big Sylmar quake hit (1971). Fast forward to 1989: I left the Bay Area and went to the Paso Robles area in San Luis Obispo County, then the Loma Prieta quake happened. No sooner had I left SLO County, when the San Simeon Quake hit and did a lot of damage in Paso Robles.
I’ve read that a strong quake can hurl boulders through the air. So I would think a quake could hurl you through the air too. That might hurt.
I was in Anchorage for the 9.2 quake in 1964. Loud rumbling, but not deafening (kind of like standing a couple of feet from an express train when it goes by); whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on, which would only hurt you if you got knocked off your feet. I suppose an elderly person could feel joint pain from being jerked back and forth.
I can easily see how a quake could cause boulders to roll downhill…but how would it lift them up? The vertical movement of the ground waves is pretty minor. The energy comes from shaking back and forth, like a dog shaking off water. There isn’t any single large upward impulse, which would be necessary to lift a boulder. Or a person.
As others have said (and I have been through some of the same events) it’s jostly and bouncy and shuddery and jerky, but it has never lifted anything that I’ve ever seen.
I suspect your source may possibly be in error, or mistook rolling boulders for flying ones.
(I once saw the Gila River in a flash flood, and enormous boulders appeared to be rising and sinking. I suspect, though, that I was being fooled by optical illusions, and the boulders weren’t actually being lifted by the force of the water. However, the flood can definitely carve the sand out from under boulders and cause them to drop away a little.)
I was there during the 2005 Kashmir Quake. (Magnitude 7.6). It was loud, like a grumble and it was not painful. I managed to run down the stairs fairly easily. I do remember standing in the drive way and being eye level with the upper floor window at one time.
It’s not uncommon for earthquakes to trigger heart attacks in some people. But that’s probably as close as you’re gonna get for quakes being directly painful, aside from falling debris and stuff.
The quake can impart lateral velocity to the ground, and if there happens to be an incline next to the boulder, then the incline may get shoved under the boulder, lofting it up into the air. Imagine someone kicking a soccer ball with their toe forward and catching the underside of the ball so that the top of their foot lofts the ball in the air, and you get the idea.
The velocities/accelerations of the earth during a quake are far, far lower than those involved in an explosive detonation. The term “shock wave” is properly associated with the supersonic air movements resulting from explosions, but not with the ground motion one experiences in an earthquake. Here’s an earthquake simulator in action, showing footage from outside and inside the test structure; you can see that the peak velocities involved are probably not more than 10 MPH, and the accelerations are a fraction of a G. You may have trouble staying vertical, but your legs aren’t going to get ripped off; the pain happens when a 400-pound refrigerator slams you against the wall at 10 MPH, or a bookcase falls on you.