Earthquake!

The weirdest thing happened last night. I was woken up by a loud rumbling and then the house shook. We were experiencing a rare event in England, an earthquake! So rare in fact that we didn't know what it was to st rat with: the heating wasn't on so it was that, we looked outside, no lorry crashed into a neighbouring house. No sirens. It was peculiar and not a little scary. It seems it was a magnitude ~5.3 quake with the epicenter near Lincoln (about 70 miles away).

Being in England 5.3 is a pretty big tremor but nothing compared to the following list: the top ten recorded earthquakes by magnitude. These were not necessarily the most deadly but the strongest. The damage here was minimal, a few lose chimney pots, items shaken off shelves and only one recorded injury, the following list were something else.


1 May 1960 -Valdivia, Chile magnitude: 9.5
2 December 2004 - Off west coast northern Sumatra, Indonesia: 9.31
3 October 1737 - Kamchatka, Russia : ~9.3
3 March 1964 -Prince William Sound, Alaska, USA: 9.2
5 November 1952 -Kamchatka, Russia: 9.0
6 January 1700 - Cascadia subduction zone: ~9
7 January 1906 -Colombia-ookEcuador: 8.8
8 February 1965 - Rat Islands, Alaska, USA: 8.7
8 November 1833 - Sumatra, Indonesia: 8.7
10 November 1755 - Lisbon, Portugal: ~8.7



Britain's previous worst earthquakes:

June 1931 - in North Sea near Great Yarmouth: 6.1
July 1984 - Nefyn, north Wales: 5.4
April 1990 - Bishop's Castle, Shropshire: 5.1
September 2000 - Warwick: 4.2
October 2001 - Melton Mowbray: 4.1
September 2002 - Dudley, West Midlands: 5.0
December 2006 - Dumfries and Galloway: 3.5
April 2007 - Folkestone, Kent - magnitude: 4.3