This was the strongest earthquake I felt since I moved to Bay Area ten years ago. Luckily, it was quite short. Woke me and all my friends in the SF and vicinity up though.
I've lived in California all my life and was in San Mateo during Loma Prieta. How close you are to the epicenter has a strong effect on what you experience (it's undoubtedly more complicated than that but distance is a big factor). Last night's was 14.8 miles away from me and although I woke up, I didn't hear earthquaky sounds and shaking was moderate. Thought my partner had just flopped over in bed harder than usual. By contrast, a few years ago we had a 3.1 centered about 1.5 miles away that really made me fear it was a big one. The house jumped and stuff swayed, and I was just thinking I'd better get next to the bookcase when it stopped.
Contrast that with my experience in Ireland - 10 years and I heard thunder only twice, and saw a lightning strike only once. We sometimes get alerts due to some tropical storm that made its way up here, and the most we need to do is to collect our garbage bins and avoid biking because of the gusts.
This can't be true. We have thunder and lightning on a regular enough basis. The lightning is rarely of the fork variety though. And although the 'named' storms usually pass without much damage, it's not uncommon for people to be killed by falling trees etc. and large numbers of people to lose power. We're very lucky when it comes to lack of dangerous natural phenomena or animals but thunder is incredibly common.
I’d say the same about East Anglia in UK, but in early ‘90s there was a tremor strong enough to notice. It was particularly strange then because you had to wait for the news on TV or radio to mention it.
That's actually surprising to me. Being in the North Atlantic, I would have thought thunder storms would be common. I lived in LA for 5 years, and I definitely missed thunder and lightning. If I were going to space, I'd bring rain/thunder/lightning sounds to listen to like we've seen in sci-fi films even more so than the ones with cricket sound tracks.
I live in Dublin, which is shielded from the worst storms. Still, the weather patterns are not conducing to thunderstorms and lightning strikes average to around 10 per day over the whole island.
There is. "In 2024, Ireland recorded almost 3,400 cloud-to-ground lightning flashes (lightning strikes), marking a moderately stormy year, but well below the exceptional year of 2023, which set a record with more than 9,000 cloud-to-ground lightning flashes detected."[1]
I'm from Georgia where summer thunderstorms are extremely common and we had ones that were so explosive that candles would vibrate off the fireplace mantle. I moved to SoCal and i'm always amused when a small storm comes by once a year and people freak out.
I miss those storms man. Nothing like sitting on the porch and watching them roll through
I was 3 miles from the epicenter. By far the strongest I’ve felt since I moved here 15 years ago. Hard to imagine what a 6+ would be like on the Hayward fault.
It was centered half a mile from Berkeley Lab at 2:56am, on the Hayward Fault. Knocked out the elevators in my building and one other building, but other than that no obvious issues. We've been told to be on alert for anything that looks off. Hard to predict how this affects some of the Lab equipment.
FWIW, I've been expecting something like this. The Pacific Rim ("ring of fire" or whatever you want to call it) has been overly active, and that second 7+ magnitude earthquake in Kamchatka was definitely not a coincidence. That said, earthquakes are not my area, but it is a topic we talk about in terms of catastrophic failure of storage systems as "Hayward Fault Tolerance" where we have tertiary backups in a region outside of the earthquake zone.
Mid-4s is where most people start feeling quakes, though the actual significance is pretty low. You'll tend to see/hear a lot of chatter online or in media.
At mag 5 there's localised damage, most characteristically of goods knocked off grocery store shelves, with glass-bottled liquids often producing a photogenic mess.
At mag 6, pre-code construction or at-risk areas (bay fill, river bottoms, sand) may see significant structural damage. The 2014 South Napa earthquake is the most recent of these, and downtown Napa was hit pretty hard, due to terrain (reclaimed river bottomlands, bay-fill, and some old masonry construction). See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_South_Napa_earthquake>.
Mag 7 is the scale of some of the largest quakes recorded in California, including the 1906 San Francisco quake. This would create widespread damage within 100+ miles of the epicentre. Marc Reisner's A Dangerous Place (2003) includes a detailed description of impacts of a mag 7 quake along the Hayward fault, which would extend well beyond the immediate region into Southern California due to reliance on delta and Central Valley water projects.
As someone who lives in Japan and has a lot of experience with earthquakes, the magnitude tells you not a lot, the depth and location/geology can easily change it from something you don't even feel to something quite big.
This is why I use every chance I can to espouse a scale like Japanese Shindo which actually measures the surface shaking (what matters to civilians) rather than the Magnitude scale that just measures the energy of the earthquake (more interesting to seismologists). Japanese news always focuses on the maximum observed Shindo which immediately tells you had bad it felt/affected people living nearby.
I grew up near a town called "Moodus" in Connecticut which constantly made noises and had small quakes.
But it didn't prepare me for the few small quakes I experienced in the bay area (typically a bunch of car alarms go off and dogs bark, there's a thud, and then a gentle rocking).
There are even earthquakes you can feel in "Old England". Not often, but I've experienced one. Lived in the BA for a few years and felt many small quakes. Lived in a very seismically active part of Montana for 25 years and felt nothing. YMMV.
What previous commenter meant is there are part of the world like in Chiappas,MX where 4.x earthquakes are occuring several times a day and people get along with their lives just fine.
Magnitude scales and felt shocks don't really correlate well. These are like Wh and V, only roughly indicative of each others. You have to look into maximum recorded accelerations.
Everyone is secretly (or openly) waiting for Teh Big One we’ve been promised for decades, when Western California will fall into the ocean and Las Vegas become a seaport.
There's an SF short story (Larry Niven I think) about a seismologist who predicts the big one, but the math is not quite right, the story gets out, panic ensues everyone heads for Nevada, he guy is still working in his lab trying to figure why the sign on his equation is coming out negative when all the rest of the US falls into the sea leaving just his part of CA
This is a great cliff's notes version that actually makes me want to read it, especially since it's a short story. From the description, that's all it needs.
This was the plot of a James Bond movie and when I was a teen I thought it was brilliant. Crack California off at the San Andreas- what could go wrong?
Many of us on this website live in the bay area. The earthquake woke us up with a stern jolt and now you're witnessing a shared moment in the community as we try to drift back to sleep.
I was in a hot tub with friends! We wall went to Portola Music Festival and we were having a nice connective low key evening when this big shake surprised us!
I was in a self-driving cab while live-tweeting a founder therapy circle on my way to my rooftop co-living space for a seed round pitch for my biohacking startup!
What’s maybe peak California about it is that everyone in the hot tub was trans, and aside from me everyone had come to California as a refuge because they couldn’t be themselves in other states. California is one of the few states where we have a chance to live our lives on peace and relative safety.
I live in a nearby city and it woke me up (bed was shaking). Felt bigger than that, but not enough to knock anything over, seems odd to be on HN front page.
> The U.S. Geological Survey's most recent forecast, known as UCERF3 (Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast 3), released in November 2013, estimated that an earthquake of magnitude 6.7 M or greater (i.e. equal to or greater than the 1994 Northridge earthquake) occurs about once every 6.7 years statewide. The same report also estimated there is a 7% probability that an earthquake of magnitude 8.0 or greater will occur in the next 30 years somewhere along the San Andreas Fault.
There is an 80% probability that an earthquake of magnitude 8-9 will occur in the Nankai trough (massive subduction zone along the Pacific coast of Japan) in the next 30 years. Yes, you read that correctly. Eighty percent. It's almost a certainty.
San Andreas sounds like nothing by comparison, especially since it doesn't pose as much of a tsunami risk.
It's also worth noting that a mag 8 is about the maximum expected from the San Andreas fault, a strike-slip fault, and most quakes come in well under that. The two largest quakes I'm aware of, the 1906 San Francisco and 1857 Fort Tejon quakes, were mag 7.8 and 7.9 respectively.
Significant damage can be experienced starting at about mag 6, though that tends to be pretty specific (individual structures, often pre-dating earthquake codes, and locations on poorly-suited terrain such as riverbottoms, reclaimed wetlands, or sand). Widespread general damage would only be experienced with larger quakes (mag 7--8).
Japan has a significantly higher risk of mag 8--9 quakes. The 2011 Tōhoku quake was a magnitude 9, which is 100 times more powerful than a mag 7, and over 100,000 times more powerful than this morning's temblor in Berkeley. Japanese faults include subduction zones and considerable tsunami risk.
Similar risks exist between the California-Oregon border through to British Columbia on the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and could similarly product a mag 9 event.
The Cascadia earthquake in January 1700 produced a tsunami that traveled all the way across the ocean and hit Japan with 16-foot waves. That's what mag 9 looks like.
It's a point of comparison to illustrate the differences. CA is seismically active, but not to the degree of Japan. Reading any further into it than that was clearly not the intent and would be foolish.
It is a minor earthquake, especially for a region with generally high standards and tolerances for actual earthquakes. It's enough to certainly notice (if you're awake) and make people look at each other like "Whoa, neat" but that should be the start and end of it.
The point is it is not notable. It is business as usual. These happen multiple times a year. It is nearly as notable as a rainy day in LA in the summer.
we are talking about relative notability. Seeing an apple or orange for the first time is notable to that person. But not to the others living in an orchard.
This quake is a tad more notable than rain in LA in the summer. In other words, not very notable. That doesn't make it zero, just very low.
Shaking like this does not happen multiple times per year, at least in the Bay Area. Last night’s was the strongest quake I’ve experienced since moving here.
Isn't this the opposite of how it works? My understanding there is some algorithm that severely downranks threads that get a lot of comments in relation to the upvote count.
