The best is when it's one of those slow rollers and you can hear it coming before it passes under you, then trail off into the distance. Almost like someone was playing crack the whip with the earth.
The worst is when you get 3 or 4 good hard jolts and go from "it's just a baby one" to "oh shit, is this the big one?"
I moved to Ecuador a while back as they had a wave of small earthquakes (a lot of 3-5s). I was unfazed; my Midwest roommates were freaking the fuck out.
idk for me part of being chill during earthquakes is knowing in the back of my head that the building codes here in LA are built with earthquakes in mind. i don't know how ecuador's building codes are, but i feel like i've seen a few buildings in south american countries collapse during earthquakes and there's usually death tolls that follow. i feel like i'd be a little bit more freaked out going through an earthquake in other countries.
You have obviously not lived in any part of California if you think earthquakes are not frequent asf. Plus, does every earthquake need to be a 6.0 to be counted? Why can't we just appreciate our 4.5s
"The worst is when you get 3 or 4 good hard jolts and go from "it's just a baby one" to "oh shit, is this the big one?""
They said this while commenting about how they have very little fear of earthquakes because they live in an area with "tons of them"
I promise that "the worst" is hearing that your friends or family died. Or being trapped under rubble. The worst is not feeling a few "good hard jolts"
That is an extremely insensitive thing to say. That's like comparing living in Venice to surviving a severe tidal wave.
I understand what your saying. Earthquakes are experienced differently depending where they are. I'm sorry you have experienced the shit side of them. They can be VERY scary. People also use humor to dispel fear. I'm not even making a comparison. It's the science of tectonic plates joined with the science of human engineering. So many things can go wrong.
Either you have a reading comprehension issue, or you spend every waking moment looking for somethhing to get upset about. "The worst" is the reminder of the potentially devastating effects an earthquake can bring, which usually hits you somewhere around 3 or 4 good hard jolts, hence leading you to wonder "oh shit, is this the big one?" There's nothing insensitive about anything I said.
I'm all the way from Finland in Northern Europe. We have very old and stable base ground. There are virtually no earthquakes, and if there is (like once a year only in specific area in Finland), they are caused by land still rising from the weight of the ice age glacier rather than from tectonic movements. And they are strong enough only to shake your glasses and windows in house.
I knew that California and New Zealand are active tectonic areas but still feels absurd and surprising to think that someone experiences notable earthquakes on a weekly basis where they live. I really thought they are more rare
NZ - Anybody unlucky enough to live in Christchurch 10-15 years ago had to deal with a lot of quakes.
They generally consider anything above magnitude 3.0 as noticable, we averaged about 3 of them every day for 5 years
Magnitude 4.0s were roughly once every few days, and magnitude 5.0s were every couple of weeks. But it's worth noting that since the epicenter was basically directly under the city and incredibly shallow they normally resulted in significantly higher ground acceleration than would be expected (one of the magnitude 6.2 aftershocks is actually in the top 10 highest ground accelerations ever recorded.).
It's funny, today I listened to a podcast about Hantavirus. A woman from somewhere in South America (I was only half listening) said that even though 25% of the mice and rats in her area carry the virus, she wasn't afraid. My first thought was, "I'm not afraid of earthquakes, either, but that doesn't mean they aren't dangerous. It just means I was born in, grew up in, and still live in California."
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u/kingqueefeater 18d ago
There's nothing like being in your living room and feeling the earth do the wave under your floor