Well that was weird. I was in a meeting here in Baltimore, things started shaking in a moderately alarming “from everywhere” sense, then everyone’s in the street nervously laughing. Now I’m back in my office typing this. Notable damage includes the wooden shutters that go over the top part of my window coming open and allowing a previously unseen amount of daylight in.You probably know already, but the source was a 5.9 magnitude quake about 100 miles southwest of D.C. Word is that you could feel the thing clear to New Hampshire and in office buildings in New York. Notably, that part of Virginia, and most of the East Coast, is considered to be just about the bottom in terms of earthquake hazard, with the strongest Northeast earthquake ever recorded being in Massachusetts to the tune of, well, 5.9 magnitude. By Richter scale standards, that’s the rough equivalent of a 15-kiloton blast of TNT.Curiously, the U.S. Geologic Survey cites no metric with today’s 5.9 mark, maybe because there are a whole bunch of ways – the Marcalli intensity scale, the European Macroseismic Scale, the Shindo scale, and on and on – of measuring various facets of temblor magnitude and intensity, like seismic moments, durations, and surface waves.At any rate, turns out there’s a small spot called the Central Virginia seismic zone, which is about where the quake came from. Unlike the West Coast, quakes here are pretty random; they don’t come from one big known fault, but a collection of little dudes and a bunch more deeper, undetected faults. It’s an unpredictable mess. And what’s worse, quakes in the eastern U.S. spread much farther because of a weird bedrock situation. Hence, why you could feel the thing in New Hampshire.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
