Here in central Oklahoma, we are down at the southern tip of the Humboldt Fault.
I know a little about seismology. It became a childhood fascination after we moved to Anchorage, Alaska just a year following the Bad Friday Earthquake in 1964. (That would be the common Alaskan pun on Good Friday, when the quake struck.) When I was in college studying for my teacher’s exams, I chose that as my project. I still have all the slides somewhere. The USGS did a massive study of it, and the college library had the whole thing, two full shelves of stuff. Over several months I read as much as I could understand without taking senior level mathematics.
All that math the scientists developed for it doesn’t help us here in Oklahoma. They have no idea why things are shaking here. We had a 5.6 in the middle of the night, about 3 miles (4.8km) deep. Apparently where we now reside is somewhat isolated from whatever is shaking, because all we got was an audible rumble and the mobile home shook just enough to wake me. Since our house has never sat tightly on the pilings, we usually don’t feel the minor stuff. But it’s anchored, so we would have to have a truly major shake locally to even shift it noticeably.
Unless the ground actually reshapes itself under us, a mobile home is about the safest place to live in a fault zone. We are more worried about the water tower 30 feet (9m) from the back of the house.
But there’s not much chance of this being the result of any nukes or other skulduggery around here. This is flyover country. Nothing ever really happens here. We can’t even get the economy to crash decently, since we are one of those exporting states: oil, gas, food, water, etc. The tornadoes and wildfires are a bigger threat here. Wish we could export those.
-
Contact me:
-
ehurst@radixfidem.blog
Categories