Anatomy of a shake

Well! That really wasn’t the sort of movement that I was thinking of when I saw the topic for this week’s photo challenge but this little sucker cooked off about an hour ago and the earth sure was moving!! Not the hard nasty jolts that happen down south but just a gentle rolling movement (imagine your house being placed on a waterbed) that lasted a good 10-15 seconds, although you can see from the table above that the event actually went on  for the better part of quarter of an hour.

Like the big one centred off Taranaki on Tuesday night (I remember that because it was right after Hawaii 5-O) which was bigger at 7+ but way deeper (about 230+ km) this started slow, almost like a feeling of dizziness before you realise that it is actually the room moving and not you and started to build up to a point where heading for doorway or table seems like a good idea, then it just fades away to series of distant waves over the succeeding minutes…

I can also again comment with some authority on the old wives tale that animal have some sort of prescient warning of phenomena like earthquakes: it’s bollocks!! Kirk and Lulu were doing their standard floor mat impressions and did not so much as move let alone whimper or bark during the whole thing. And it’s not like it’s just these two…twenty-two years ago, a series of what  were then thought quite nasty quakes (well, actually they were quite nasty – just not on the same scale and Christchurch) shook Palmerston North and the Manawatu/Horowhenua areas over a period of a fortnight or so. The last decent one was on a sunny Sunday and I distinctly remember my flatmates two dogs, dead to the world on the deck as power poles and light standards visibly pitched and rolled as the ground rocked…

Huh? Whassgoin’ on?

…and the final figures have just come in…after scientific review, this one has been confirmed as a 5.2 on the Richter scale and 91 km deep…and just to the side of our active volcano…