The past two weeks the earth felt more alive with events here and other places! Sat Oct 21st, North Iceland's coast had a 5.8Magnitude earthquake, raising concerns for the community of Húsavík. There are many earthquakes every day, yet this occurred along a normal fault in the oceanfloor and is moving along a transform toward the town. The fault line goes thru the town!
Links from seismic stns around the world and local map in Iceland.
Then, the earthquake along BC's coast happened the following Sat., Oct 28th, well, our geophysics teacher has been sending us links and info for the events constantly which is cool. A neat earth map shows the BC quake took 9 minutes to reach us here in Iceland. It was neat to focus on my home province, look at it from Iceland in this way. One site even shows the shaking in your home town in BC! We'd just been learning about seismicity, p-waves, s-waves, faults & crustal movements so we've been learning from each event in Iceland and BC. A speaker from Saudi Arabia who was raised in N Iceland, did his PhD in USA and works/teaches in Saudi Arabia oil companies, etc, spoke to us about the earthquakes. The Hurricane Sandy happened. Then on Friday, Nov 1st, the winds were sooo high in Reykjavik that people were warned to stay inside, people were blown over and broke ribs (15 to hospitals), cars off the road, some roads closed beside the ocean. I heard that the winds were higher than the hurricane Sandy but this was normal for Iceland (not sure if it's true but could be). In the news, there is a building downtown Reykjavik that's architectural design supports wind flows around it that literally pick people up when the winds are high! Poor design. I had biked to my 8:20am class only to find that I couldn't bike - the wind threw me around so had no balance and then my toque flew off, disappearing in a second. It was probably in the Atlantic Ocean seconds later lol. All of the bikes in the bike stand were laid over on the ground. Niall's bus driver took two children at a time from inside the school to the bus, because children weren't allowed outside at the school. Parents were told to pick up their children. Of course, we can't read the newspapers or listen to the news so that makes it interesting. Last, but not least, geomagnetic storm a few days ago made the aurora at high rating for dancing northern lights :) There's a cool site, for Iceland weather, that shows the rating for northern light activity, earthquake activity over the past 72 hrs, road conditions and more. It's common for Icelanders to wake up in the morning with their coffee and check out the www.vedur.is website to see the latest quake activity before starting the day. Often, class starts with looking at it in the morning :) Gotta love it!! :)
Links from seismic stns around the world and local map in Iceland.
Then, the earthquake along BC's coast happened the following Sat., Oct 28th, well, our geophysics teacher has been sending us links and info for the events constantly which is cool. A neat earth map shows the BC quake took 9 minutes to reach us here in Iceland. It was neat to focus on my home province, look at it from Iceland in this way. One site even shows the shaking in your home town in BC! We'd just been learning about seismicity, p-waves, s-waves, faults & crustal movements so we've been learning from each event in Iceland and BC. A speaker from Saudi Arabia who was raised in N Iceland, did his PhD in USA and works/teaches in Saudi Arabia oil companies, etc, spoke to us about the earthquakes. The Hurricane Sandy happened. Then on Friday, Nov 1st, the winds were sooo high in Reykjavik that people were warned to stay inside, people were blown over and broke ribs (15 to hospitals), cars off the road, some roads closed beside the ocean. I heard that the winds were higher than the hurricane Sandy but this was normal for Iceland (not sure if it's true but could be). In the news, there is a building downtown Reykjavik that's architectural design supports wind flows around it that literally pick people up when the winds are high! Poor design. I had biked to my 8:20am class only to find that I couldn't bike - the wind threw me around so had no balance and then my toque flew off, disappearing in a second. It was probably in the Atlantic Ocean seconds later lol. All of the bikes in the bike stand were laid over on the ground. Niall's bus driver took two children at a time from inside the school to the bus, because children weren't allowed outside at the school. Parents were told to pick up their children. Of course, we can't read the newspapers or listen to the news so that makes it interesting. Last, but not least, geomagnetic storm a few days ago made the aurora at high rating for dancing northern lights :) There's a cool site, for Iceland weather, that shows the rating for northern light activity, earthquake activity over the past 72 hrs, road conditions and more. It's common for Icelanders to wake up in the morning with their coffee and check out the www.vedur.is website to see the latest quake activity before starting the day. Often, class starts with looking at it in the morning :) Gotta love it!! :)