Shoutbox

yeah, im alive

i was checking out the shoutbox when it started. It started slowly and, as i said, i didnt bother about it as we get a lot of tremors in Chile (because we're "in between" the Nazca and South American tectonic plates, so we're all used to them ). So i even took the time to make the "woah" shout i was about to post that it was tremoring when things got worse, though.

Suddenly it got really hard, so i quickly went and stood under the door frame, which is the safest place during a tremor/earthquake in case you didn't know . Then things started to fall at home, it was REALLY noisy, so noisy that i had to yell at my father (who'd just woke up) that i was ok, even though this is a small appartment. i saw how there was a crack appearing at the wall right next to me ;o. Then there was a powerdown, no more lights to see any of the action . Then it slowly stopped .

i must admit tht i like tremors, i even enjoy them, but this was way too much, it was really scary ;o. The strongest part of the earthquake lasted for about 15/20 seconds .

So that's it, we got a lot of aftershocks, but nothing really important We cleaned up a bit before going to bed after an hour or so .

Btw, the earthquake was 8.8 (Richter) in the epicentre and about 8 here in Santiago.

quote:

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Saturday's quake comes weeks after an 7.0-magnitude earthquake devastated parts of Haiti. The Chilean quake, at magnitude 8.8, was 700 to 800 times stronger.

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As the quote says, this earthquake was ~700 times stronger than the one in haiti, how so? Because Mercalli is a logarithmic scale, meaning that a change in 1 magnitud means a hell of  lot of change in the energy of the earthquake. Still, as i said before, we know that we live in a sismic country, so we make our buildings in order to resist these things. Hence, there wasn't so much damage (at least in santiago, which is the capital city and has more modern structures ). I went out to see how bad it was and tbh you can barely notice there was an earthquake over here. There is some major damage in other places though.

see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8540522.stm

Edit:

My walls ;o