All shook up

A friend of mine who was caught up in the Boxing Day tsunami wins hands down as she was literally able to say the earth moved for her while she was on her honeymoon, but despite the much more prosaic circumstances in this case, yesterday's earthquake still shook me up!

PNG is located in the Pacific 'Ring of Fire' zone, and earthquakes are common but today's was quite a biggie at 6.4, and the epicentre was only 110km from Madang, though more than 200km deep down under the sea. It surprised me to find out just how common they are, with more than 250 earthquakes recorded worldwide in the last week alone: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/

I was sitting in my office when things just started shaking: I could feel the movement through the desk, through the floor, and it just kept coming in waves, and set the big wooden bookcase wobbling and looking like it might topple. What I find most interesting is just how long it took me to turn the sensation of the earth shaking into the articulated thought, 'It's an earthquake'. It was almost like my brain kept taking wrong turns time and again, looking for alternative explanations - it just couldn't compute that the ground was moving beneath me.

Irene, my office mate and I just looked at each other and she said something about it being a really big one. That was when I realised I didn't know whether it was best to stay indoors (yes, luckily as that's what I did) or go outside. I had just missed a big quake last May, flying out of Bogota a few hours before it hit (it was 5.7 and there were some fatalities) and I had been very pleased to have missed it. I don't know if you get people rushing towards quakes in the same way you see nutters with camcorders rushing headlong into tornadoes, but it certainly holds no appeal for me, one is more than enough.

It was quite funny really... both Irene and I just carried on working and didn't even talk about it, and then on the way across campus heading home everything seemed completely normal, as indeed it was. The only difference was that now I was watching where the overhead powerlines and other dangerous objects were so I could try to take evasive action should there be another one.

An earthquake in Tok Pisin is apparently a 'guria'. Somehow I knew there would be a word for it;-)