Today, I was in and out of sleep when I felt the mattress jiggle. I thought I was just having some really cool realistic dream until I heard we had a 4.1 magnitude earthquake at 4:35 a.m. this morning. I heard the news on the way to work, so it reassured me that I'm not completely losing my mind.
Anyways, it was pretty neat to experience the quake. The bed rumbled for 10 or 15 seconds and then I fell back to sleep. I thought the scale below best represented what I felt. The difference between a 4.1 and a 7.1 doesn't sound like much when related to magnitude, but when it is related to tons of TNT for the Seismic Energy, you really understand how huge of a difference it is. 1,000 tons of TNT vs. 32 million tons!
Richter TNT for Seismic Example
Magnitude Energy Yield (approximate)
-1.5 6 ounces Breaking a rock on a lab table
1.0 30 pounds Large Blast at a Construction Site
1.5 320 pounds
2.0 1 ton Large Quarry or Mine Blast
2.5 4.6 tons
3.0 29 tons
3.5 73 tons
4.0 1,000 tons Small Nuclear Weapon
4.5 5,100 tons Average Tornado (total energy)
5.0 32,000 tons
5.5 80,000 tons Little Skull Mtn., NV Quake, 1992
6.0 1 million tons Double Spring Flat, NV Quake, 1994
6.5 5 million tons Northridge, CA Quake, 1994
7.0 32 million tons Hyogo-Ken Nanbu, Japan Quake, 1995; Largest Thermonuclear Weapon
7.5 160 million tons Landers, CA Quake, 1992
8.0 1 billion tons San Francisco, CA Quake, 1906
8.5 5 billion tons Anchorage, AK Quake, 1964
9.0 32 billion tons Chilean Quake, 1960
10.0 1 trillion tons (San-Andreas type fault circling Earth)
12.0 160 trillion tons (Fault Earth in half through center,
OR Earth's daily receipt of solar energy)
