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Earthquake in Iceland

Just caught this news, wondered if Abaya & company are okay? Anything significant occur around you?

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe...ake/index.html

CNN) -- An earthquake shook southern Iceland on Thursday, reportedly causing injuries and damaging roads and buildings.

The 6.1 magnitude temblor struck about 3:46 p.m. (11:46 a.m. ET), according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Its epicenter was about 50 km (31 miles) east-southeast of the capital, Reykjavik, and was about 10 km (6.2 miles) below the Earth's surface.

It was unclear exactly how many people were injured or the severity of their injuries, Olli Tynes, a journalist with Reykjavik's Channel 2, told CNN.

A hospital in a town near the epicenter was also reported damaged, and some wings have had to be evacuated, he said.

There were no reports of fatalities, but "great material damage," Tynes said. Roads and bridges in the area have been closed.

Iceland's emergency management agency has swung into action, and rescue crews were headed to the area most affected by the quake.

Tynes said he has been speaking to residents of the towns closest to the epicenter. "They said they thought the world was coming to an end," he said. "They thought they were going to die."

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There have been no reports of homes collapsing, as most homes in Iceland are built to withstand earthquakes, he said.

Alti Mar Gylfason said he had received reports of damage to the road that rings the island nation. The quake was felt nationwide, he said.

"It was a little bit like you're sleeping in a waterbed, you know ... everything floats around," he said, adding that people poured out of buildings into the street. "This is not something we experience on a normal basis."

Although Iceland is seismically active, its last major quakes were on June 17 and June 21, 2000, with quakes of 6.5 and 6.4, respectively. The temblors damaged homes and buildings, but caused no serious injuries

Jeez, I hope everyone's okay.

What's with all the earthquakes recently? Is it just the more crowded locations of the quakes or are they suddenly more common?

Hey, thanks for checkin' in, Leto... yep, we're all good here. I was just typing away on my laptop in the kitchen when it started, and it took me a second to figure out that it wasn't construction or some idiot neighbor drilling in the basement. I ducked under the table and watched things rattle around, though nothing broke... it was really quite anti-climactic, actually.

I think one guy broke his arm, or at least that's what they said on the evening news here. RVK is about 30 miles west of the epicenter (Selfoss), so things were apparently a bit worse around there... stuff falling off shelves, etc.

But really, considering the strength of the buildings around here, it's not a catastrophic event. When your entire country sprouted up from between two diverging continental plates, I guess you learn how to build sturdy houses. It would take a real nasty quake to shake these thick, reinforced concrete walls down! (And divergent fault lines don't get the most severe quakes, thank goodness.)

Any good earthquake stories out there? I experienced 2 in Seattle, one in high school and the other after college (Nisqually in 2001--I was driving, and it felt like my car blew out a tire, since it careened suddenly towards the side of the road!)... the Nisqually one was 6.8, probably the biggest I've felt.

Iceland is definitely one of the safest places to experience an earthquake, I'll say that much. It does seem like the news reports are exaggerating a little bit, just looking for something scary to report on... funny that Iceland only makes international news when we get an earthquake!!! (Condy Rice is scheduled to visit here tomorrow, incidentally...)

Dear Abaya,

I hope you enjoyed the little reminder I sent your way. Sorry it was unsubtle, but it was the best I could think of at the time. Maybe now you'll post pictures of the mini-Chicago/suburban Chipotle meet-up from last month. Drew wants to see pictures of his car seat.

Hugs n kisses,

The Great and All Powerful Jazz

PS - glad that nothing fell on you. Or anyone else.

PPS - I have been in 5 earthquakes that I know of. I slept through 3 (including a 4.5 with an epicenter about 3 miles from my place) and didn't notice the others (I was running a 5000 during one and hiking near a waterfall for another).

Thank goodness you're ok.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Willravel

What's with all the earthquakes recently? Is it just the more crowded locations of the quakes or are they suddenly more common?

No shit. This makes four- Illinois, China, Columbia, now Iceland- in what... 2 months?

On another note, I think it is time for me to break out that specific Fogerty album out...

http://www.vedur.is/skjalftar-og-eld...kagi/#view=map

one of the icelanders passed this to me in IM....
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1...etiq/ismap.png

red spots are the Selfoss area, the blue grey area with the orange dot near it is Reykjavik metropolitan.

OHNOOOOEES!!! It's the summer of the earthquakes!!!

this is news? seriously, i thought i didn´t get enough sleep last night, everything became wavy. it was the sound of my open door creaking that made me think something was going on. wonder if geysir will respond?

sheesh. looking at the map there sure are a lot of aftershocks. i´m feeling nothing :(

Quote:

Originally Posted by lotsofmagnets

wonder if geysir will respond?

Ooh, that would be cool. And just in time for the tourist season!
Personally I'm hoping this is the sign of an impending volcanic eruption, not too close to here though.

6.1 is sizeable, but I have to confess I wasn't too worried since I knew abaya had been through earthquakes before. I'm still glad to hear you're all all right and doing well and weren't too shaken up by it.

And abaya, we felt the Nisqually quake all the way down here in Oregon! The makeup of the soils in the Willamette Valley is such that it transmits seismic waves quite well (too well in some places...if we ever had a huge earthquake portions of the Valley would liquefy). I was walking across a field at my university at the time of the earthquake and didn't feel it myself, but I noticed that none of the birds were in the trees and thought that was quite odd. When I got to class, everyone was outside, all stirred up because they had to evacuate the buildings and check everything. After class, I returned to my dorm to find that the earthquake had moved my bed (which I had lofted on my desk and a wide windowsill) four inches. Scary! Minor earthquakes were relatively common when I was a kid in Washington, so I wasn't really bothered by it, but it certainly woke a lot of people up down here to the very real idea that we could have an earthquake--and a big one--here.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ktspktsp

Ooh, that would be cool. And just in time for the tourist season!
Personally I'm hoping this is the sign of an impending volcanic eruption, not too close to here though.

my boss tells me they ssaid the area around vatnajökull is becoming active and we should see an eruption there in the near future but recently mentioned was reykjanes becoming active as well. hopefully we´re in for some fun times

Quote:

Originally Posted by Leto

It was unclear exactly how many people were injured or the severity of their injuries, Olli Tynes, a journalist with Reykjavik's Channel 2, told CNN.

A hospital in a town near the epicenter was also reported damaged, and some wings have had to be evacuated, he said.

There were no reports of fatalities, but "great material damage," Tynes said. Roads and bridges in the area have been closed.

Iceland's emergency management agency has swung into action, and rescue crews were headed to the area most affected by the quake.

Tynes said he has been speaking to residents of the towns closest to the epicenter. "They said they thought the world was coming to an end," he said. "They thought they were going to die."

This Tynes guy was actually part of my company for a while (though I've only seen him a few times). He's quite old, and an institution in Iceland, but apparently not taken very seriously as a journalist (I think he covered the celebrity / lifestyle section). So he might be bullshitting a bit when talking about the reaction of the people :)
He was also a bit of a creep when it comes to women.
Anyway, small country.

I just want to say that even MORE scary than the earthquake, was a PM from lotsofmagnets saying that he had recently been within a few meters of our apartment, about an hour ago... and I think I actually heard his voice (my ear picks up on English being spoken around me, here), since he and his buddy got locked into our building's courtyard by security, and they had to climb over the gate to get out. :) SMALL FREAKIN' COUNTRY, I tell you.

Quote:

Originally Posted by abaya

Hahahaha...hilarious.

Quote:

Originally Posted by onesnowyowl

Hahahaha...hilarious.

Hilarious, except for the fact that I don't even know what he looks like, or what his name is!!! Literally, ships passing in the night! Somehow, though, he got a feeling that we live in this very building, and he was right!!! Damn scary, I tell you. :)

I was once told that the weeks average in Iceland was 150 earthquakes (subtract a number of your choice :-), it goes without saying that 99% of them are very small.
But between 2 pm and 11 pm today (May 29th 2008) there have only been aprox. 100 earthquakes of magnitute 2 or greater on the Richter scale.

Those that want more interactive look http://drifandi.vedur.is/skjalftavefsja/index.html (might only work in IE).

Yours
Zweiblumen

Zweiblumen!! Are you also our neighbor, sneaking around in our courtyard? Please don't tell me that you also live in Vesturbær, lol. :)

goto vedur.is and click on the map with all the little red dots on it. aftershocks galore! boring since i´m not feeling anything :(

Quote:

Originally Posted by abaya

got locked into our building's courtyard by security.

says something about the country´s security when they lock you IN rather than out.

I heard about this in BBC radio when I woke up this morning and my first thought was to the TFP Iceland. Glad to hear you are all OK.

im yet to hear anything here on the news or online on any australian news sites. strange.

glad that everyones ok!

australia isnt known for its seismic movement, though back in around 1989 (i think) we had one around 150km from Sydney but i never felt it.

ps. id we wary of lotsofmanets if i were you :P

Thanks for the thoughts guys :)

Woo-hoo!!! The USGS has upgraded us to 6.2, as opposed to a measly 6.1 yesterday. :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by dlish

ps. id we wary of lotsofmanets if i were you :P

shhh! i though we agreed there would be no advance warnings :expressionless:

Quote:

Originally Posted by abaya

Woo-hoo!!! The USGS has upgraded us to 6.2, as opposed to a measly 6.1 yesterday. :)

too true. 6.1? i eat that for breakfast but 6.2? that´s some serious shit right there. i´m thankful i survived that one.

Dude, I heard someone creeping around our courtyard gate again last night, after you posted... it wasn't you, was it??!

dammit. if i didn´t have an alibi placing me in hafnarfjörður overnight at work i would have claimed it was me :no:

Quote:

Originally Posted by lotsofmagnets

dammit. if i didn´t have an alibi placing me in hafnarfjörður overnight at work i would have claimed it was me :no:

Oh really? Seriously... there were 2 dudes in the courtyard at around midnight (I could see them, since it was so light, of course)... and then I heard them clang over the gate as they left, so I figured it was you again. :lol: I was thinking, STALKER!!!

our friend in selfoss is okay, Skogafoss says her house looks ransacked. If get photos I'll post them.

the epicantre was very close to selfoss and hveragerði but there seems to be contradiction putting the epicentre a little northest of selfoss then in the newspapers the epicentre is almost under hveragerði. i think we were spared a lot here because where i live (and thus ktspktsp and abaya) we are exactly on the other side or reykjavík and out on seltjarnarnes so i suspect the city would have dampened the vibration and i also suspect the peninsula (nes is the icelandic word for peninsula) would have had a dampning effect as well. by contrast my boss said at work which is 15 km south on the other side of the city nearly perfectly in the direction of selfoss they felt it quite strongly and it clearly disturbed several of the people i work with. the newspapers have several pictures of cracked roads and trashed houses in selfoss.

Thread Jack/ I recently experienced mt first EQ, 4/18/2008, 4:37 A.M. Central Time, New Madrid fault, epicenter near Bellmont, IL. I'm about 200 miles away in TN, just happened to be up & going to the bathroom when the 5.2 hit. Just shook my house, no damage. Willravel probably thinks this aint nuttin. It was to me........end/threadjack.

wild to see the dust up across the lake... took a while for me to figure out what I was looking at...

Quote:

View: The Loneliest Quake on the Planet
Source: Time
posted with the TFP thread generator

The Loneliest Quake on the Planet
Sunday, Jun. 01, 2008
The Loneliest Quake on the Planet
By Krista Mahr

The casualties of the earthquake lie face-down on the wet pavement outside Brynjolfur Gesson's garage, their red hats and white beards a mess of ceramic shards. Unlike his garden gnomes, Gesson wasn't home when the earthquake struck his home earlier in the afternoon, sending a wide crack up the wall of his kitchen, where broken plates, beer cans, and paper lie in a chaotic heap on the floor. As his neighbors cram mattresses and suitcases into cars as they head for the homes of relatives in nearby Reykjavik, Gesson can't say where he plans to go. "I don't know," he says, frustrated, and retreats back inside to survey the damage.

Although last week's quake near the small town of Selfloss registered 6.1 on the Richter scale, and was followed by over 100 small aftershocks that rattled windows and nerves late into the night and the following day, there were no serious injuries or major structural damages. Still, "Everybody was visibly shaken," says the town's police chief, Olafur Helgi Kjartansson. "We didn't have any clue that it was coming."

Iceland carefully monitors its seismic activity, as well it ought to, for this isolated nation of just over 300,000 makes its home on a piece of volcanic rock that is among the most unpredictable pieces of land on the planet. Above the Earth's crust, its cosmopolitan and wealthy population shops for Land Rovers and new condos, while beneath the ground, magma chambers churn, occasionally rising to the surface with varying degrees of destruction. Iceland straddles the mid-Atlantic ridge, where the Eurasian and North American plates are slowly drifting apart. Unlike locations where parts of the earth grind up against one another, the drifting apart of the plates means a lot of small quakes — but not usually the kind that dislodges wall radiators or send Scandinavian-modern shelf units flying across the room.

As shocked as they may have been by Thursday's quake, they were not unprepared. Minutes after the quake, police were on the streets ordering people to evacuate their homes in anticipation of an aftershock. They were quickly joined by hundreds of search-and-rescue volunteers, regularly called on for such varied emergency tasks as fetching tourists trapped in bad weather to pulling vehicles out of glacial crevasses.

A little over three hours after the quake, dozens of SAR volunteers in red fleeces, all-weather pants and hiking boots are gathered in a parking lot in Hveragerdi, waiting for orders from their command center. Emil Jonsson, an electrician by trade from a suburb of Reykjavik, got a call from his unit within 15 minutes of the tremor. He has already finished going through houses in the area to assess any damage. "The houses were okay, but everything inside had fallen," says Jonsson. "Now I?m waiting for another job."

Ten minutes along the road past the wide green fields of sheep farms, an orange tent stands alongside a mobile command center outside Selfloss' police headquarters. The street is lined with white SUVs rigged with thick antennae and monster tires, while dozens of uniformed police officers mill about drinking coffee and smoking. Police Chief Kjartansson surveys the disarray in his headquarters, littered with scattered papers and filing cabinets. "If somebody had been taking their passport picture an hour earlier, you can see what would have happened," he notes, pointing to the tall metal column that has fallen on the precise spot where people sit to be photographed. At the door of another office, a bookshelf has collapsed onto a chair. "If somebody had been sitting at that desk," he says, not finishing his sentence.

Modern Iceland has been remarkably lucky in the face of its unpredictable geography. Past centuries may have seen catastrophic natural disasters, but the worst in the nation's recent history was a series of avalanches in the 1990s that killed over 30 people. But if the hundreds of volunteers, the dozens of converted emergency 4x4s, the strategic maps and the shelter tents seem like overkill in response to the day's minor toll, they also reflect the fragility and communal sense of responsibility fostered by Iceland's isolation. Since the U.S. military pulled out in 2006, Icelanders take the manifestations of their isolation — whether it's a lack of fresh produce or facing the forces of nature without any immediate help — with a Nordic stiff upper lip. As evening approaches in Hveragerdi, a small town built on a geothermal field so active that geysers have been known to spontaneously sprout in people's backyards, two boys bounce a pair of basketballs past the squadron of SAR volunteers. Did they feel the quake? "Yeah!" says Thorarinn Fridricksson, dribbling his ball. "We ran outside. I was laughing."

there was another minor quake here at about 6:30pm which was a 4.1

6:30 pm yesterday?? I did not feel anything... weird. Ktspktsp and I went camping on Saturday night, just on the north side of Esja, and I swear I felt a tiny little earthquake there sometime between midnight and 1am (we went hiking at that time--so light!). But maybe I'm just oversensitive now...

Are you saying you felt the earth move? maybe it wasn't geological? :thumbsup:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Leto

Are you saying you felt the earth move? maybe it wasn't geological? :thumbsup:

Ha!! Well no, THAT happened earlier that night, if you really want to know. ;)

However, at the moment that I *might* have felt the earth rattle, we were sitting at a picnic table eating Mountain House freeze-dried camp food out of a bag... and I swore my butt was vibrating for a good 20 seconds, and I heard some of the nearby farm equipment rattling, too. (I can see the next sex toy now... "Earthquake-Simulator! Vibrates in all the right places!!") :p

Quote:

Originally Posted by Leto

Are you saying you felt the earth move? maybe it wasn't geological? :thumbsup:

Yeah, maybe it was a frozen donkey wheel. For those of you who missed that reference, you seriously need to watch Lost.

Anyway, I'm glad everybody is ok. I hate to scream catastrophe, but it is a bit strange the amount of natural disasters recently.

Quote:

Originally Posted by abaya

I swear I felt a tiny little earthquake there sometime between midnight and 1am (we went hiking at that time--so light!). But maybe I'm just oversensitive now...

take your pick :)
http://vedur.is/photos/jarisls_rit/080603_2245.png

But hey now, that's only from yesterday and today... is that from around Selfoss, or also RVK? Did you feel the 4.1?

Quote:

Originally Posted by abaya

Mountain House! A good friend of mine works where they make it.

And one of my favorite little earthquakes happened when I was taking a bath; I was around twelve or so. The vibrations were minor, but steady, and I probably enjoyed it more than I should have.

i didn´t feel the 4.1 and i was in ásland in hafnarfjörður, ie the closest part of rvk to where it happened so should have but i was probably busy at the time and you know how sturdy stüff is here, no rattles or squeaks to give it away.

and that chart is the whole of iceland one, but lets face it, 99% of those dots are from the one area....