Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Illinois 4.3 earthquake shakes up Wisconsin, Iowa, and Twitter

The Illinois 4.3 earthquake was felt not just north of Chicago and in Wisconsin and Iowa, but on Twitter. The USGS reports "a magnitude 4.0 eastern U.S. earthquake typically can be felt at many places as far as 60 miles from where it occurred, and it infrequently causes damage near its source. A magnitude 5.5 eastern U.S. earthquake usually can be felt as far as 300 miles from where it occurred, and sometimes causes damage as far away as 25 miles."

Twitter is the place to go to determine how people were impacted. Illinois is one of the top hashtags as of this writing. Here are some selected tweets:

ellenzar Snow, we can live with it..it's only a foot so no closings EARTHQUAKE!?!?!This is Illinois NOT California..woke me up..drove the cats nuts
half a minute ago from web

flubdubs DAMNIT this is the second Illinois earthquake I've slept through.
less than a minute ago from web

lisamarieyonke 4 a.m. earthquake wake anyone up? I thought it was a dream...we're not supposed to have earthquakes in Illinois!!
1 minute ago from web

geraldinecols @nbczoraida hear this... Around the same time of the Illinois earthquake, Ecuador had one of 3.9 magnitude. Crazy. Is the world ending?
2 minutes ago from TweetDeck

DainasaurRoar So it was definitely an earhquake. 4.3 at 4 am. Second one i've felt in illinois recently
2 minutes ago from web

While earthquakes do occur all the time, anecdotally there does seem to be a large number of major quakes within the past month and a half and in Haiti, Argentina, Venezuela, Eureka, CA, and Illinois.

Stay tuned.

No comments:

Post a Comment