Day 58: Central Oklahoma Earthquake
I know the above image is not a “meteorological image”, but it was too rare of an event not to use it as today’s blog post.
Overnight a magnitude 8.8 earthquake decimated parts of Chile. Shortly after the earthquake, a tsunami began affecting portions of the South American coast along with several islands off the coast of Chile. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued a basin-wide tsunami warning. (There have been reports of tsunami damage along the coast of California.)
I spent a good deal of the afternoon watching live streaming video from television stations in Hawaii in anticipation of the tsunami’s arrival. While watching Hilo Bay, HI empty and refill during the tsunami, my chair lurched forward as if someone or something hit me coincident with a distant thud sound. I was stunned. I then started to ask my friend, Kiel Ortega, if he felt the shake at his house, but before I could ask him if he felt it, he asked if I felt something. I then went and asked Sarah if she felt something (which she had). I quickly learned, via Facebook and Twitter, that it was not an isolated incident and people all around me (and not so nearby) had felt it. It was a little after that when I learned it had been a 4.4 magnitude earthquake northeast of Oklahoma City.
I’ve always wanted to experience an earthquake. Now, I can check that off my to-do list…
Educational Note: Just so everyone is aware, the Richter Scale, which is used to gauge the intensity of an earthquake, is a logarithmic scale – not a linear one. I have heard several news outlets report that the 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Chile today was 1.8 times stronger than the 7.0 earthquake that hit Haiti recently. This is flat wrong. The Chilean earthquake is actually 101.8= ~63 times stronger than the Hatian earthquake. The Chilean earthquake was 104.4=~25,118.8 times stronger than the central Oklahoma earthquake
