"Did the Earth move for you, darling?"

The stock-in-trade joke of many a gagsmith came very much to reality last night. I only knew of the biggest earthquake to hit Britain in 24 years this morning, on the school run. One mother was saying someone she knew had slept throught it. That's the whole thing about earthquakes in Britain. You only know about them in the morning! Most of the regular tremours are put down to sleeping problems. It would never occur to most of us to think the Earth actually had moved in the night!

On the Richter scale the quake was about 5.2. Helpfully, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) claimed that, while the event was "light to moderate" on a world scale, it was "very significant", given the UK's relatively uneventful seismic history. So the Earth did move for some. Thankfully, without any trauma or troubling aftershocks.

Posted in: earthquakes,seismology,UK