The “Fun” Continues
It takes time for the plates to adjust: Another quake shakes southern Illinois
(CNN) — A 4.5-magnitude earthquake shook southern Illinois early Monday, the latest in a string of quakes that have rattled the region since last week, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The quake — the 18th since a magnitude 5.2 hit the area Friday morning — was centered about six miles below ground and about 37 miles (60 km) north-northwest of Evansville, Indiana, or about 131 miles (211 km) east of St. Louis.
It struck at 12:38 a.m. local time (1:38 a.m. ET). There were no immediate reports of damage.
Until the Hedgemony decides no one really cares about such things and abolishes it, you can get more information at the USGS Earthquake Center.
These are probably a series of aftershocks, but occasionally the release of pressure at one location over-stresses another fault and you have a separate quake. The veteran ‘quake people don’t get too excited about these “minor” events, forgetting the first time they realized that the ground wasn’t as solid as they had believed all their lives.
5 comments
…well, if it comes to having to respond to the Hedgemony, I suppose the locals could build their own personal seismic detectors like we did back in the pre-intertubes days during the earthquake swarms prior to the Mt. St. Helens eruption. We took a few feet of plumb bob string, tied one end to a mechanical pencil, and tacked the other end to the office ceiling. It would sway gently in response to low-magnitude quakes that were just below the threshold of physically detectable…
I felt the first one on Friday… it woke me up. I thought it was low flying aircraft and went back to sleep. Occasionally we get choppers buzzing the suburbs, which shakes the house and rattles the windows. Of course I was half asleep, so maybe that explains my lack of concern.
I haven’t felt any of the subsequent quakes here in Chicago, so hopefully they are only aftershocks and not a separate quake.
In our barracks in Alaska we had wire strung for the curtain that constituted our door. The wire would hum during minor ‘quakes. A guitar player among us could predict the strength based on the humming, but the pendulum is a better plan, Jack.
They seem to be coming on the same fault, LM, so I assume it’s just settling down.
Ha…those are piddly jiggles.
However, I feel slighly comforted knowing that I live in a part of the country where buildings are built to withstand a certain amount of shakin’ and bakin’.
That is the real problem. The building codes for the Midwest weren’t designed for ‘quakes, and that can cause a disaster in a minor quake. Something that wouldn’t even rate a second of coverage in San Diego could devastate a city in Indiana.
I wouldn’t enjoy a 5.0 in the dorm where I lived at Indiana University.