Shake, rattle and roll

I can't quite believe that we've lived in 'The Shaky Isles' for ten months without experiencing an earthquake, but last night we broke our duck.

I was woken just after one o'clock by a low rumbling sound and wondered, quite calmly, whether it was an earthquake coming. This thought popped into my head because neighbours of ours told us just a few weeks ago that you can always hear an earthquake before you feel it. Sure enough, several seconds later the house started to shake from side to side. It felt like a gentler version of the earthquake simulator we went on in the Te Papa museum in Wellington. The shocks only lasted about two seconds, but were big enough to wake Iain, which is saying something ;-).

I was interested to find out whether the earthquake was a minor, local event, or whether we'd been on the outer limits of a bigger quake. I made a mental note to try to find the earthquake on the national earthquake site when I got up this morning.

It didn't take long to find details of the quake. It registered 5.9 on the Richter Scale which sounds pretty big to me (but then I'm no seismologist) and the epicentre was out in the middle of the Cook Strait, the stretch of sea separating North Island from South Island. I wouldn't like to have been sailing on the midnight ferry last night!

Click below to read
details about this morning's earthquake.