A little before 2 a.m. today I was getting ready to shut down the computer and toddle off to bed, when WHAM, there was a loud bang and a thud, and the bowl of ice cream flew off the top of my computer desk and landed on the floor. Well, guess what, Toto, we're not in Arizona anymore. Nopers, we are still vacationing in the San Francisco Bay Area, so the sky was not falling in. It was just another normally occurring earthquake.
I went to the USGS pages to report this event and while I was filling out the little survey the second one hit. USGS has wonderful resources for learning more about the local quaking and shaking activity in this part of the world. Here is an illustration worth more than a thousand words:
Quake History for this Location
Using the tools on this site, I learned that the center of these recent quakes was here:
37.818°N, 122.068°W
I went to a nifty site called Earth Tools to find our current location:
37.8783°N 122.0801°W
Earth Tools is worth blogging about because it has many tools you can use for free to find out the elevation or time or exact location of a particular place and even when the sun will rise and set. The panning and zooming on this site works better than other map services we have tried. Instead of having to type in an address or move the mouse to a spot on the map and click, this service places a big cross in the center of your screen and you just pan until your desired location is under the cross and then zoom. For me that is a much more intuitive way to find the information.
While zooming you can also change the view from map to satellite or hybrid or contour. You can save your favorite locations to visit again, so I am saving the Earth Tools location here so that I can find it again:
No matter how much shaking is going on, though, I know my data is safe.
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