How does it feel in an earthquake?

Answer 1

During an earthquake the ground moves up, down and sideways very quickly. This feels very strange and disconcerting or scary because our bodies are trying to find a stable point and there isn't one. The exact feeling will depend on many things, including:

* The size of the earthquake (how much energy is involved) * The depth of the quake (how deep it originates under the ground) * The distance horizontally from the quake origin * The type of ground it has travelled through * What you are standing on and how flexible it is

Here are two quite different examples from my experience:

1. I was lying in bed in an old timber framed house up on a hill in Wellington, in the North Island of New Zealand.

I was shaken back and forth very rapidly as if a very big person had grabbed my bed and shaken it vigorously. I saw the walls flexing.

The quake was just over 4 on the Richter scale and less than 10km away, and centred about 5km deep.

2. I was standing leaning on a glass wall in a Doctor's waiting room in Christchurch, in the South Island of New Zealand.

I felt the wall sway back and forth a bit like being on a boat on gentle waves (and at first thought I was getting sicker!) and then realised that the glass was flexing. The quake had travelled through the flat gravelly Canterbury plains to where I was, so the wave pattern of the quake travelling through the ground had changed to big slower sways.

The earthquake was reasonably distant. (It was centred near Arthur's Pass about 150km from Christchurch.)The quake was centred about 5km underground and was 6.7 on the Richter scale. There were many landslides caused by it, but because it was in a remote area, very little damage was reported. Hikers in the area reported items in a hut falling to the floor, some broken trees and rock falls.