You can barely feel a 2.9.

There are approx. 200 - 300 earthquakes like this a year in Britain, usually so small you rarely notice them. No big deal. No devastating pictures of lawn furniture.

What was the great mid-Atlantic quake, like a 5.1 or something?  I barely felt that, first one in my life I ever felt actually, didn't even realize it was a quake until I saw the news.  A 2.9 is absolutely nothing, I don't think that would even get neighborhood dogs barking.

/oblig

Voiceofreason01: You can barely feel a 2.9.

That's what she said

2.9?

So, a landwhale ate a bean casserole yesterday?

"I do believe I felt something that time Charles ... it was somewhat like the earth was moving."

"Righto. Jolly good."

Didn't know they had Taco Bell in England.

abhorrent1: We're all English today!

I did forget to brush my teeth this morning ...

/I kid, I kid

I have only felt one earthquake in my life. It just felt like a big truck going by the house. The weird part was the strange low frequency noise.

Ghastly: I have only felt one earthquake in my life. It just felt like a big truck going by the house. The weird part was the strange low frequency noise.

I've never felt one, I always seem to sleep through them.

I don't think I would notice a 2.9. I believe Southern California get ones around that daily but no one notices or gives a shiat.

England you are a bunch of pussies

2.9?

I guess this is where the Calfornicans who were whining when the temperature dipped below 55 earlier this week try to sound tough.

/but yeah, 2.9 isn't much. We had a 3.5 last summer and all I noticed was my fridge rattling.

abhorrent1: Corvus: England you are a bunch of pussies

[i.imgur.com image 527x489]

Ooh! People in Cali are so cool and tough. They can handle their house shaking a little once in a while.
Come to the mid-west and sit in the path of an F4 Tornado. Bring extra underwear in the event you survive, ITG.

Am I biatching about some strong wind? No.

Hearthquakes 'ardly 'ever 'appen in 'ertfordshire.

Small quakes are common in the UK. Most often they occur in the midlands, it seems.

Charles Hoy Fort collected many descriptions of "anomalous" small quakes and descriptions of "thunder" from the sky which accompanied them. If he had been less of a skeptic and a joker, or if he had had some knowledge of, say, medical semiotics, he might have realized that these sounds did not really come from the sky but were created by the quakes. As it was he was a skeptic and a joker and liked to mock the positivism of nineteenth and early twentieth century science, so he suggested these sounds really did come from the sky and that they may have had nothing to do with the quakes.

The British Isles are still rebounding from the ice cap that covered bits of them during the last glaciation. Scotland is rising, and conversely, the South of England is sinking. This, combined with rising sea levels and erosion, as well as some human activities such as peat cutting, has resulted in a fair amount of land lost to the sea, including some prosperous medieval towns and villages.

Although Britain is not sitting on the kind of subduction zone that produces the most spectacular earthquakes and volcanoes, it is still mildly geologically active, hence the small earthquakes. I don't know of any really big ones in historical times.

There are similar areas in North America where small earthquakes are common and large ones very rare.

We have had a number of earthquakes between 4 and 4.5 in the National Capital Region (or rather, in nearby Quebec) and in my native New Brunswick. I was indoors through all of these, but the building swayed and made a noise like trouble with an elevator in one, and the dishes rattled in another. My parents and neighbours reported that the earthquake sounded like a train going by across the river in this latter case, because they were outside on the patio.

Both the Ottawa River Valley and the Maritime Provinces are also sinking gently because of the rebound of Hudson's Bay and the surrounding tundra and boreal forest from the last glaciation, so I suppose we are experiencing the same sort of geological activity as the UK. There are other places where earthquakes are more violent. The St. Louis area has had bad quakes in the past and will likely have another soon, which is to say within the next couple of centuries, because you can't really predict earthquakes much better than that . The mechanism and type of these earthquakes is quite different from the usual quakes that you get in California or Japan. You can find more details online easily enough.