Rare South Texas Earthquake Spooks Some Residents

Photo Taken Near Quake Epicenter
from San Antonio Express-News

South Texas is as far away from an active seismic zone as one can imagine. Well, our knowledge of what's under the earth's crust is (pardon the pun) still pretty thin. So when the earth moves in South Texas, as it did today, the event can shake people up. The LA Times ran a brief story on the 4.8 earthquake.

Damage was minimal, but South Texans were wondering what was going on, as the East Coast similarly wondered during its own surprise quake.

All Shook Up Over East Coast Earthquake

Yesterday's East Coast earthquake, with its unlikely Virginia epicenter, was felt in my suburban New Jersey workplace. I happened to have just pulled into an office parking space in what my mechanic calls a "high-mileage Honda" when I felt the car shake horizontally. I thought something was wrong with the engine, so I turned off the ignition. I started the car again; it ran smoothly; I returned to the office wondering about the state of my automobile.

When I walked into the office, my colleagues asked me if I had felt any shaking. I thought about it and said "yes." They then informed me about the earthquake.

It's not the first time I've been in an earthquake on the East Coast. A couple of decades ago, I was living in New York's Astoria neighborhood when tremors struck around 4:00 am. I woke up immediately and thought to myself "that was an earthquake." The irony is that I've been in two earthquakes on the East Coast, while never experiencing one while living in seismically active San Francisco and central Italy.

To my knowledge, no immediate members of my family have ever gotten all shaken up. However, some of my friends and acquaintances have. Of their many stories, I'll simply mention three. On the benign side, an Anglo-American couple were staying in a Venetian albergo when the building shook, a result of a calamitous tremor in Montenegro. Nothing more drastic than swaying chandeliers and askance furniture resulted. Our former New Jersey neighbors were living in their native city, Santiago, Chile, during that South American country's disastrous 2010 seismic events. They and their residence, as far as I know, survived the encounter. However, not all my friends and family were so fortunate. One of my cousins survived Southern California's 1994 Northridge quake, but his San Fernando Valley house did not.

The oddest seismic experience for me was watching a World Series game interrupted by what turned out to be the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Watching an earthquake live and in color was profoundly unsettling. Today, the ubiquitous phone cameras make such transmissions almost routine, as footage from Washington, D.C., in particular, demonstrated. The big issue, though, is that there's nothing routine about an event where everything gets "all shook up."

The photo shows Washington, D.C. law enforcement officials directing the evacuation of the Lincoln Memorial after Tuesday's earthquake.

Japan Earthquake Affected Earth's Axis

The LA Times, which has provided some insightful reporting into Japan's recent natural and nuclear disasters, posted a fascinating story about the impact of Friday's seismic activity on the Earth's axis.

Incredibly, according to scientists interviewed by the Times, the earthquake shifted the planet's axis. It also made the Earth rotate faster. That provides a profound hint at the strength of the seismic phenomenon. The concepts involved, however, are difficult to imagine. It is more challenging, and awesome to contemplate, that the events actually happened in the past few days.

An added note: The New York Times included a story in its March 14th online editions on this topic. The article offers significant detail, and in some cases, clearer information regarding the change in the planet's axis.