Earthquake

I experienced my first earthquake.  Back when I was living in Montana, we had a very small one.  I was out running and somehow missed the whole thing.  How?  I don't know.

Friday night, I was in bed, reading, when everything started to shake.  There was a terrible rumbling noise to accompany the shaking and the racket my bedside lamp was making didn't help the situation any either.  Not going to lie, it was rather scary.  I knew immediately it was an earthquake and knew housing was built on a fault (but what isn't in California) but still, it was a heart-pounding 20 sec ride.  At the same time, it was a powerful experience for me to feel just how powerful the forces of the earth can be.

Thanks to USGS and Google, I have the images below.  First, here is a map from USGS.  This is showing earthquake activity.  The light blue dot near the Nevada border shows where the quake occurred.

Here are the specs for that quake.  It's a bad image, I know.  It was a 3.2 magnitude, 59 km (36ish miles) SSW from Beatty, Nevada.

It occurred at 10:37 pm, Friday the 17th.  The latitude and longitude coordinates are also listed for the epicenter.

To make it easier, I turned to Google and had Google maps pin-point that epicenter.  The source of the quake is where the red dot is west of the highway.  The red dot east of the highway is my house.  The scale on this map is down in the lower-left corner.  With all I've done to the image, I don't know how accurate that scale is anymore, but basically, I live less than ten miles from the epicenter.

I talked to my dad about it.  He lived in California for four years going to school but never felt an earthquake.  However, when he was living in southern Idaho, he did feel the Yellowstone earthquake of 1959.  He was fairly young at the time, but the memory of it was still very clear.

Wow.  Mother Nature.  Wow.