That's not an earthquake...

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THAT's an earthquake!

Apparently there are different words that Costa Ricans use to describe the severity of earthquakes or tremors, from sacudidos (small shakes), through temblores (tremblings) to terremotos (serious quakes). It just so happened that Zoë was reading this very information at about 1:20pm today when the whole house started to shake. This was not the same small rumble that I experienced for a few seconds yesterday, this was "the walls are moving and things are falling off shelves" experience. It lasted about 20 seconds and there have been smaller tremors occurring all afternoon since. After my post yesterday Peter warned me to be careful with what I write (i.e. my slight exaggeration seems to have now come true), so I will just report that the Costa Rican news (lanacion & teletica) are calling it a terremoto de 6.2 grados - which I translate as an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.2.

It looks like the epicentre was near Volcan Poas and unfortunately there have been at least two casualties and many are still trapped in buildings and rubble. It is apparently the strongest quake here for 20 years and I see that it has even made the world (BBC) and even our local news in Scotland (STV)!

This YouTube footage shows the strength of the tremor (especially at time 0:50).

From the U.S. Geological Survey website:

Life can often be quiet and slow here in Costa Rica, but it is rarely boring.

Earthquake!!!

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At around 10am this morning, I was sitting looking through e-mails on the computer. I had literally just clicked send on an e-mail when the room starting shaking. Had the e-mail been too much for the telephone system in Costa Rica? Or had the content angered the gods? It would seem that neither was true, but rather I had just experienced my first earthquake (or tremor, but quake sounds more impressive).

It only lasted about 3 seconds, but it was an unusual experience to feel the room move about without having first drunk 5 pints of Stella Artois.

Here's a seismic graph showing that I didn't just imagine it (from the Heredia seismic monitor section of the web site of El Observatorio Vulcanológico y Sismológico de Costa Rica):


Zoë, who was upstairs in the bathroom at the time, felt nothing.