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11/14/2007

Shake, Rattle, and Roll

When I lived in places that actually had significant weather, I like watching the Weather Channel. It fascinated me. Especially when we lived on the coast of Texas and had hurricanes threaten us, I'd check in frequently for the latest status. Keep in mind, this was pre-internet.

Now, whenever there is the least bit of earth trembling, I log in to this site to see where the earthquake was located and its magnitude. Some kind of sick fascination? Maybe. More likely, I just like to be informed.

Naturally, I love a Firefox addon called eQuake Alert that I recently discovered. Every time the earth shakes somewhere in the world, your browser shakes and the magnitude and location show up in the bottom of the window. Besides the major activity in Chile today, there's been quite a bit of 2.5-3.0 shaking in Central California. Good to know.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting. The KFWB page is just scraping the quake list off my office web site:

http://pasadena.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Quakes/quakes0.htm

That's all right, but you might want to bookmark the original pages where the information comes from.

That eQuake thing runs off the RSS feed from the main Earthquake Program web site. That works, but just be aware that that site is subject to being struck down by huge amounts of web traffic after a big earthquake. That happened two weeks ago with the M5.4 near San Jose.

You can also get earthquake notices by email using My Pet Project:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/ens/

You can get pick what regions and magnitudes you want to hear about and it sends them right to you. The biggest quakes generate something like 85,000 messages, and it can take up to 10 minutes to send all those emails, but it's pretty reliable. I make sure it's reliable, since it's My Pet Project. If it looks good, I look good.

Did I ever mention that I work at the earthquake office?

Anonymous said...

Isn't that scary? In the mountains of Colorado I didn't have to worry about anything (other than snow, natch), but now that we're in Tennessee, we're on tornado watches and the FREAK me out! :(

TiggerLarue said...

Being originally from Iowa I was a big fan of the Weather Channel and watched it a lot, just because. After moving to California I was often teased about my continued appreciation of it. That and the fact that I called soft drinks "pop". I call it soda now, but secretly I still get sucked in to the weather channel. Don't tell anyone, k?...

Anonymous said...

Wow ... sounds a bit scary. Esp living where you are. Mind you New Zealand is an earthquake prone country too!
Hope you are feeling much better health wise now.

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