Kansas Snapshots by Gloria Freeland - August 15, 2025
"I feel the earth move under my feet"
Everybody remembers their first time.
On July 20, husband Art and I were supper guests at friend Jan's home in Oswestry, England. Daughter Leanne, son-in-law Steve, and their
two children were also there.
We retired to the living room after supper for pudding - what we colonists call dessert. Art mentioned there had been a magnitude 7.4
earthquake off the eastern coast of Russia earlier that day. Steve immediately began describing his first quake experience.
(What did you think I was talking about?)
The house and windows were shaking about 8 or 9 a.m. lasting about 3-4 minutes. Very scary for a 13-year-old home alone.
Art also happened to be in the UK that day and clearly recalled the quake.
I had just awakened and was getting out of bed to visit the toilet. As my weight came down on my feet, I nearly fell over and I noticed the room moving. My immediate reaction was I was having some sort of medical event.
Oddly, first-husband Jerome and I were also in bed in our apartment in San José, Costa Rica when a quake struck. We felt shaking and looked at the windows. The drapes were swaying.
Friend Bryce's tale also had a bed-based theme:
I woke up to an earthquake on my 31st birthday in Mexico City. It was about 1 a.m. and I was sleeping on the couch at the apartment of my friends Pablo and Nuria. ... They came running into the living room talking loudly and pointed to the chandelier swaying. ... I was pretty sure they were spoofing me. I assumed they had manually set the chandelier to swaying just as they woke me up. Then, at about 5 or 6 a.m., the sofa started jumping ... I hopped up and went to a window, looking for a quick route to the outside.
The quake Art and Steve described began at 7:56 a.m. on July 19, 1984 and was of magnitude 5.5, the largest ever recorded in the UK.
Earthquakes are also rare in the Midwest. But on December 16, 1811 - only yesterday in geological matters - a quake about as strong
as the recent Russian temblor struck near New Madrid, Missouri in the state's far southeast corner. Magnitude 8.8 quakes followed in
the first two months of 1812. President James Madison felt them in the nation's capital and church bells rang in Boston.
That was more than two centuries ago, so a person might assume the conditions that spawned them are long gone. But at about 11 a.m. on
November 9, 1968, Art was walking from the living room to the dining room of his apartment in Madison, Wisconsin when his first
encounter with a temblor took place. It was named the Illinois Earthquake, but was generated from the New Madrid rift. At a magnitude
5.5, it was about 1,000 times weaker than its 1812 ancestors. Yet scientists think another "big one" is coming.
The recent Russian quake was followed by an 8.8 magnitude aftershock on July 30. The temblor that leveled San Francisco in 1906 was of
a similar magnitude, but the Missouri quake was in what was then a remote area of our country and so did comparatively little damage.
While San Francisco rebuilt, some quakes leave permanent mementoes. During the New Madrid event, land near the Mississippi River in
Tennessee sank, creating the 15,000-acre Reelfoot Lake. It's the state's largest natural body of water and a focus of recreation and
commercial fishing.
The earth's crust, including the oceans, is only about 25 miles thick and floats on a molten-liquid core. Winds, seasonal heating and
cooling, and other conditions cause the crust to break and the pieces to grind against one another. When the force between them is
greater than the friction keeping them in place, a slip - an earthquake - occurs.
The July 30 Russian quake involved shifts of about 30 feet. There is about one per year of that size, but about one a day of the strength
of the 1984 Wales quake.
If the movements are vertical and under a body of water, a tsunami occurs as the water above settles. The 2004 Sumatra tsunami created a
wall of water 100 feet high, killing more than 200,000 people.
In the late 1920s, Charles Richter began working with seismologist Ben Gutenberg to assign strengths to quakes. It was only based on data
from southern-California tremors, but upon publication in 1935, it quickly became a hit. It was based on the amount of movement of the
pointer on a seismograph they created.
The scale uses ratios rather than addition. So a quake of magnitude 6 is 10 times larger than one of magnitude 5. Zero was set as the
weakest their instrument could register. The Wales temblor was about 300,000 times larger than a zero-magnitude quake. The Russian, New
Madrid and San Francisco ones were 1,000 times larger than the one in Wales.
The Richter method has largely been replaced by the Moment Magnitude scale. But for most earthquakes, the numbers are similar, so
newspapers still, though incorrectly, refer to them as being the Richter value.
Movement of the earth and destructive energy are different. So while two quakes that differ by magnitude 1 correspond to a 10 times
difference in movement, the destructive energy differs by about 30 times.
OK, one final quake tale, this one from my sister Gaila in Bolivia:
All I remember is our apartment shook, curtains swayed, and I couldn't walk, cuz it felt like waves. I couldn't decide if I should stay in the apartment or get out of the building. Since we're in the penthouse, I finally decided to stay, figuring I'd be on top of the mess and didn't want to be trapped in the stairwell ...
So there you have it. Ask people about when the earth moved under their feet and their recollections will be vivid!
Top row (l-r): San Francisco in 1906; ground movement from San Francisco quake as recorded in Albany, New York. Small dots on top line are at one-minute intervals; location of the 1811-1812 New Madrid quake. Bottom row (l-r): Charles Richter; friend Bryce visited the Bloom hospital in San Salvador after the 1986 temblor; creation of a tsunami: two crust pieces collide. One on the left snaps upward, while right one submerges; recent Russian temblor location. Alaska is at the right. (sources in same order: Wikipedia, Wikipedia, USGS, Wikipedia, Bryce, BBC, Google)
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