6 ms·

4.6 is really small, what's the actual news here? Was it strangely shallow or something?

BoorishBears 1y ago
I was awake and it was definitely stonger than any I've experienced in my 3 years in SF I'm pretty sure this is the closest epicenter to SF I've seen too (at least one that was noticeable)
brian-armstrong 1y ago
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.
- SequoiaHope 1y ago
  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!
  - jl6 1y ago
    Peak California, right here sir.
    - SequoiaHope 1y ago
      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.
  - wateralien 1y ago
    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!
    - thehappypm 1y ago
      I was training an LLM to do my NIMBYism for me!
- rconti 1y ago
  Over in Redwood City, I was woken up by MyShake, and we carefully felt for something, anything... but it was not to be.
sbuttgereit 1y ago
And that was just the automated response... it was downgraded to 4.3 an hour after the event. 4.3 will certainly get your attention if you're relatively close-by... but yeah, worth a "did you feel that?!" on the local news and not much more.
bombcar 1y ago
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.
- Taniwha 1y ago
  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
  - cheschire 1y ago
    “… Alaska can come too.” https://youtu.be/kCpjgl2baLs https://youtu.be/kCpjgl2baLs
    - gnarlynarwhal42 1y ago
      lol I knew exactly what this was just from that quote! what a great time to be alive and online! endofworld.swf
      - bombcar 1y ago
        Hokay so here’s de ert.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    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.
  - p1mrx 1y ago
    "A Slight Miscalculation" by Ben Bova https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/83720/so-that-earthquake-did-you-check-your-math https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/83720/so-that-eart...
numpad0 1y ago
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.
vallismortis 1y ago
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.
chrsig 1y ago
From someone that grew up in New England, but experienced a 4.x in california: I assure you it does not feel small. The revelation that the ground does not stay where I left it was quite disturbing.
- kalleboo 1y ago
  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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Meteorological_Agency_seismic_intensity_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Meteorological_Agency_se...
- xkcd-sucks 1y ago
  New England is seismically active :) If you're not aware of it, the tremors can feel like a large passing truck or something like that https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=40.31872,-74.10004&extent=43.62953,-67.55219&range=search&showUSFaults=true&baseLayer=terrain&timeZone=utc&search=%7B%22name%22:%22Search%20Results%22,%22params%22:%7B%22starttime%22:%221900-01-01%2000:00:00%22,%22maxlatitude%22:42.816,%22minlatitude%22:41.2,%22maxlongitude%22:-69.593,%22minlongitude%22:-73.592,%22minmagnitude%22:0,%22orderby%22:%22time%22%7D%7D https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=40.31872...
  - dboreham 1y ago
    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.
  - sharksauce 1y ago
dredmorbius 1y ago
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 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. <https://baynature.org/article/book-review-a-dangerous-place/ https://baynature.org/article/book-review-a-dangerous-place/> Mag 8 is about the upper bound of expected seismic activity on the San Andreas and related fault systems.
jweir 1y ago
Many years ago a 4.5 hit when I living in Berkeley, about 2 miles aways and I thought a truck ran into my house. No rolling - just one giant jolt.
toast0 1y ago
4.6 is small, but anything above 4 is reasonable to report.
jasonjmcghee 1y ago
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. Apparently 7.6km depth is "very shallow"

I was awake and it was definitely stonger than any I've experienced in my 3 years in SF I'm pretty sure this is the closest epicenter to SF I've seen too (at least one that was noticeable)

brian-armstrong 1y ago

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.

SequoiaHope 1y ago
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!
- jl6 1y ago
  Peak California, right here sir.
  - SequoiaHope 1y ago
    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.
- wateralien 1y ago
  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!
  - thehappypm 1y ago
    I was training an LLM to do my NIMBYism for me!
rconti 1y ago
Over in Redwood City, I was woken up by MyShake, and we carefully felt for something, anything... but it was not to be.

sbuttgereit 1y ago

And that was just the automated response... it was downgraded to 4.3 an hour after the event. 4.3 will certainly get your attention if you're relatively close-by... but yeah, worth a "did you feel that?!" on the local news and not much more.

bombcar 1y ago

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.

Taniwha 1y ago
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
- cheschire 1y ago
  “… Alaska can come too.” https://youtu.be/kCpjgl2baLs https://youtu.be/kCpjgl2baLs
  - gnarlynarwhal42 1y ago
    lol I knew exactly what this was just from that quote! what a great time to be alive and online! endofworld.swf
    - bombcar 1y ago
      Hokay so here’s de ert.
- dylan604 1y ago
  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.
- p1mrx 1y ago
  "A Slight Miscalculation" by Ben Bova https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/83720/so-that-earthquake-did-you-check-your-math https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/83720/so-that-eart...

numpad0 1y ago

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.

vallismortis 1y ago

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.

chrsig 1y ago

From someone that grew up in New England, but experienced a 4.x in california: I assure you it does not feel small. The revelation that the ground does not stay where I left it was quite disturbing.

kalleboo 1y ago
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Meteorological_Agency_seismic_intensity_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Meteorological_Agency_se...
xkcd-sucks 1y ago
New England is seismically active :) If you're not aware of it, the tremors can feel like a large passing truck or something like that https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=40.31872,-74.10004&extent=43.62953,-67.55219&range=search&showUSFaults=true&baseLayer=terrain&timeZone=utc&search=%7B%22name%22:%22Search%20Results%22,%22params%22:%7B%22starttime%22:%221900-01-01%2000:00:00%22,%22maxlatitude%22:42.816,%22minlatitude%22:41.2,%22maxlongitude%22:-69.593,%22minlongitude%22:-73.592,%22minmagnitude%22:0,%22orderby%22:%22time%22%7D%7D https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=40.31872...
- dboreham 1y ago
  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.
- sharksauce 1y ago

dredmorbius 1y ago

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 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. <https://baynature.org/article/book-review-a-dangerous-place/ https://baynature.org/article/book-review-a-dangerous-place/> Mag 8 is about the upper bound of expected seismic activity on the San Andreas and related fault systems.

jweir 1y ago

Many years ago a 4.5 hit when I living in Berkeley, about 2 miles aways and I thought a truck ran into my house. No rolling - just one giant jolt.

toast0 1y ago

4.6 is small, but anything above 4 is reasonable to report.

jasonjmcghee 1y ago

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. Apparently 7.6km depth is "very shallow"