8:08pm: I'm in San Francisco...I felt it...nothing fell off the shelves, but it got close...our cat freaked out a bit...don't know any info yet...i'll update later
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8:16pm: See shake map below...only 12 minutes after quake...right now, it's a 5.5 according to initial reports...looks like the Hayward fault
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8:45pm: Okay...excitement over...I guess I'll get back to work. It's officially a 5.6 according to USGS (see here). See my superbly annotated GoogleEarth image below with epicenter near San Jose in the South Bay, and my location in SF.
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9:11pm: The very first reports were a little off, and I said it was the Hayward Fault, but I was wrong - it was on the adjacent Calaveras Fault (strike-slip fault). Here's an updated map from this USGS site.
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9:48pm: What a great distraction from writing my thesis a moderate earthquake is! I was doing a little reading about the Calaveras fault system (here), and the researchers make this statement regarding forecasting:
Not too shabby...it was a 5.6.
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10:01pm: For as much time as I spend on my computer and the internet, I can't believe I never heard of this. Twitter? Apparently, you sign up and then tell people what you are doing at that very moment. Right. Anyway...here's a screenshot (from this Flickr page) showing the response to the quake. A lot quicker than the news wires, that's for sure.
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The Next Day: The updated "Did You Feel It?" map is below. In the very first version of this map (top of post), there were 174 responses in only ~15 minutes. Now there are over 61,000 responses. This is one of those things where the value of a networked world is appreciated. Fantastic.
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