Did You Feel It?

Like Margaret L Carter, (See her Thursday post) I have been reading old magazines!

Intrigued by a DISCOVER magazine article by Leeaundra Keany dating back to 2010 "Become A Human Seismograph", I googled "Did You Feel It" and was pleased to see that the site is still active.

Find it here: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/dyfi/

Apparently, at the time of writing, there were 21 earthquakes (or earthquake like events) in the last 24 hours. I think that is slightly fewer than average.

1. The USGS estimates that several million earthquakes occur in the world each year. Many go undetected because they hit remote areas or have very small magnitudes. The NEIC now locates about 50 earthquakes each day, or about 20,000 a year.Jan 13, 2015

Or, better than average! The site contains a wealth of information, such as how to geocode your own address.

We have the capability of adding geocoded maps for certain larger events with many hundreds (or thousands) of responses. To do this, we take the addresses that people provide when they fill out our questionnaire, and send them to TomTom, a company which turns regular street addresses into precise latitude and longitude coordinates (generally 6 digits of accuracy, enough to distinguish the nearest 1/2 block on a street). We then group nearby coordinates into regularly sized boxes, which are generally a few km across, and calculate their intensities the same way we do for normal ZIP code maps. To test this geocoding on your own address, try this interactive script.

Here's an early warning page: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/earlywarning/

There's an interesting page about urban noise... lots of information that might stimulate writers' imaginations. With a site such as this, any earth-shaking activity by aliens since 2005 might well be reported to "Did You Feel It". Now there's the beginnings of a plot twist.

Happy Mothers' Day.

Rowena Cherry