Hey! Are we neighbors? 
I didn’t feel a thing in north Concord. Not a bump, not a roll - nothing.
Okay…I’m in Solid Ground, Illinois. Does a 4.2 quake (plus all that other recent seismic activity) indicate something bigger and uglier is in your immediate future? I know they’re expecting “The Big One” any time. But from a scientific standpoint, is this something to be concerned with?
I barely notice the quakes anymore. The last one I felt I didn’t even realize that’s what it was until someone IM’d and asked if I felt it. I thought one of my neighbors had dropped a large box or something.
Looks like there was one about 15 miles from here tuesday while I was at lunch, only a 2.0 though.
You sure about that? Earthquakes don’t just happen in California…
In the long term, yes. There will eventually be a big earthquake in the Bay Area. We’re not sure which fault it will be on (it could be on a fault we didn’t know about until the quake happened, like this quake or the Northridge earthquake).
Short-term, lots of small to medium-sized earthquakes just happen, and no big earthquake happens anytime soon afterward. Earthquakes happen all the time in the Bay Area. I think a larger earthquake might be slightly more likely after a small one like this, but not likely enough that we panic like people in (say) Washington DC do when there’s snow in the forecast. We’re not all running out to the grocery store to buy bread, milk, and toilet paper…
Funny you mention New Madrid. I’ve been living in the Bay Area since just a few months after Loma Prieta, and the strongest quake I’ve felt was New Madrid, about 20 years ago.
Oh, I know about the New Madrid. But everything I’ve heard is that we’re far enough from the predicted epicenter that we probably wouldn’t see anything in the way of damage. I’ve actually felt a couple around here. They’re weird, but Chicago and the immediate vicinity will probably get out unscathed.
Thanks. I thought maybe hundreds in a one-week period was something to be worried about.
Nope, it’s normal.
In fact, some people worry that a big earthquake is more likely to happen if there have been fewer than normal small earthquakes- the theory being that small earthquakes release tension on faults, which otherwise builds up to generate a big earthquake.
Short-term prediction of earthquakes isn’t anything approaching a science, at least not yet…
We were sitting on the couch watching AI on the tivo, when my roommate said, “Hey, look at the chandelier*.” I look up, and the dangling tassels are swinging gently. I look it up on the USGS website and see the as-yet-unrated quake over in the East Bay. I refresh until I see the size, then go back to Idol-- only to have the broadcast interrupted to inform us of the quake.
Earthquakes are not nearly as exciting as I thought they were when I lived back east.
*like many a Victorian house, the dining room is the largest room in the house, so we use it as our livingroom.
Didn’t Los Gatos suffer some serious damage from that quake? I seem to remember that one pretty well, because I think it was the year after, I was at a Camper Van Beethoven show in Chicago, and they introduced themselves as being from “Los Gatos, California - the town so nice, they built it twice”
Are you sure you’re not thinking of the Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989?
Santa Rosa checking in. The earth did not move.
No earthquake, either.
Los Gatos wouldn’t have been damaged in the Northridge quake. Los Gatos is near San Jose, and is more than 300 miles away from the epicenter of the Northridge quake (California is a big state). California earthquakes just don’t do significant damage at that kind of distance. Earthquakes in the eastern part of the US can be felt over much larger areas, because the geology there is quite different.
The Loma Prieta earthquake probably did cause damage in Los Gatos, on the other hand.
You saying I forgot by 5 years when I saw that concert?
Oh, yeah I probably did. Thanks, that must have been it - that’s the one that broke up the World Series, right?
Yup, October 17th, 1989, my brother’s 21st birthday. He was bummed, to say the least.
Felt the quake last night in Fremont, but just a little rumble.
Yup.
I was on the 14th floor of the UCSF hospital and didn’t feel a thing. However, I was sitting on the cabinet next to the window, and I’m scared of heights, so I thought the cabinet was moving the entire time I was there.
I did feel the 3.2 last week, though.
I’ve gotten so used to them that I never feel them anymore, so when my wife will say in the morning “Did you feel last night’s earthquake?”, my response is usually no.
I did fell last night’s, though–nothing major, but it definitely grabbed my attention (I was reading in bed with the cat). My sister-in-law is staying with us, and she freaked out a little, and the Mrs. still gets scared by them, so I hugged her and told her how brave she was (she’s never been in a “real” one, though, since she moved to the Bay Area post-Loma Prieta).