Did Anybody Else Feel the Earthquake?
( Image by ultravid)
The news is very sad of course, but bizarrely, I’ve just realised that I actually felt the earthquake in China.
I wasn’t too thrilled about working on a public holiday, but it did mean that I was actually sitting down at my desk at 3:28pm, unlike the rest of you who were out having fun. Not only that, but when I felt some ever-so-slight shaking I really was immediately reminded of the the earthquake that hit Busan in 2005, probably because I was sitting in an office chair at a desk back then too (no, not blogging!). Everybody else in the institute was up and about and didn’t seem to notice a thing though, so although I did enjoy thinking for a time that I had a psychic ability to detect earthquakes that ordinary mortals lacked, like in a science-fiction book I read once, in the end I just attributed it to a passing truck or all the students running around or something. I didn’t put two and two together until 5 minutes ago.
If you look at this map, it’s not so difficult to believe really:
(Source)
News reports mention that buildings swayed in Taipei, 2000 km away, so me feeling slight vibrations while sitting down 2400 km away doesn’t sound all that implausible, eh?
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You felt it!?
I managed to get all the way to this morning without even hearing of it at which point I checked my email and all the friends and relatives who thought I would die in a sea of fire in Seoul (when the inevitable commie invasion came) were now convinced that Daejeon was in Central China and I was crushed under something.
It sounds like it was a pretty brutal one and I hope the government in China is more organized than the US has been recently.
Did you get your abstract in to Fukuoka?
I did, on both counts. As for the former, I think that if I hadn’t been sitting on an office chair, with its…er…lubricated central shaft that I think amplified the vibrations, then I wouldn’t have felt anything at all. At the time I just dismissed it, but later I realised that it simply couldn’t have been coincidence that I felt something so similar to the last earthquake on the same day that there was such a big one in China.
On a positive note, it does look like the Chinese government is resonding pretty quickly and professionally.
Did the earthquake affect Korea at all? If so, would it be shacking buildings down, im curious because i have exchange students, and 2 of them went to Korea to see there family.
No, like I said, it was virtually imperceptible, and 99% of Koreans wouldn’t have felt a thing. I only noticed it at all because I was sitting down on an office chair at the time, and no-one else else in my building noticed anything at all.