Shake, Rattle, and Roll

Well Southern California got into the shaking action of 2010 with a bit of a bang Sunday with our very own grouping of earthquake events. With a 7.2M quake in Baja (the biggest earthquake I've ever felt) and a series of related events within minutes in Imperial County just Southeast of San Diego, its been a shaky couple of days.

With Twitter and Facebook on everyone's phones, it blew my mind how fast information travelled. Within a couple of minutes I was getting phone calls and texts from friends and family far and wide, checking that we were okay or, more commonly, comparing notes. Within a minute after the shaking stopped I had 20 friends on Facebook documenting the quake, and each of us racing to post USGS magnitude maps and links. It reminds me of the last big quake I was in, and how each of us in our office raced to our computers to see where the epicenter was and what the magnitude was.

For those of us who have lived through enough of these kinds of long and rolling earthquakes, they can come out as adrenaline pumping and sometimes even kind of fun experiences - only because damage is limited and no one gets seriously hurt. By the next day everyone (including myself) is complaining because aftershocks kept waking us or our pets and we all find our houses shaking to be annoying. Maybe that's why our out of state relatives think we are crazy granola eating hippies - because we find that the result of the Earth's tectonic plates shifting is a pain in our sides and gets in the way or our daily routines. Whatever the case, I'll take Sunday's 7.2 roller over a tornado any day.

Whatever the human response, the amount of energy being released along the San Andreas down here in So Cal is pretty impressive this week. Here's a map from the USGS: