h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This morning at 12:55 an earthquake measuring 4.8 on the Richter scale ripped through the midlands in the UK.

I happend to be reading at the time in bed when I heard a rumbeling in the distance which sounded like a large truck driving twords the house. Then the house started to shake, gently at first and then quite violently. The bed I was lying in was moving at a different frequency to the room and I attempted to get out and stand onthe floor, however by this time I realised that someone wasn't driving into our house but that I had just experienced my first earthquake.

I was feeling strangly shaken, scared and excited by the experience. Shaken obviously, scared by the reality of how powerfull these things are and by the feat that must be felt by those experiencing larger quakes and excited by jhaving actually been in one. I went to see my mother (a geographer who teaches these events) and I found her shouting out of her front bedroom window at a non-existant burgular trying to break in! She had been waken up by the main part of the quake and had heard the windows ratteling.

Yeliab