Earthquake rattles northeastern U.S

[General Ceel]

Earthquake rattles northeastern U.S., shakes felt in New York City, New Jersey, Connecticut
The 4.8 magnitude quake was also felt in the Philadelphia and Boston areas.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/earthquake-ra...31839.html
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The dotted line on the map purporting to show the extreme outer limit of the zone in which the quake was felt runs pretty much directly through my home town. Although I was sitting quietly at my computer working when it happened I felt nothing. 

I've never felt an Earth Quake, although I can remember a few occasions during my lifetime when they've supposedly happened / been felt in the area. 

I live at the center of the Marcellus Shale Natural Gas  "hydraulic fracturing" (Fracking) area. Fracking can supposedly cause very shallow quakes, but despite being surrounded by thousands of wells during the past 15 years, I can't remember a single instance of such a quake ever happening here. Fracking is banned in New York State (a few miles form here) and the center of this quake in New Jersey is a few hundred miles away.

[Danster]

I've felt a couple of earthquakes. One at my family home, it woke me in the night and felt as though a massive truck had driven just past our house, but there was no main road nearby. Took me a few seconds to process what had happened and conclude it must have been an earthquake. The other I was on holiday in Turkey on the west coast. Across the Aegean Sea in Greece they had a pretty significant earthquake that was felt where we were, to the extent that a hotel guest had to go to hospital with a suspected broken leg as it made him tumble down the stairs.

[General Ceel]

Supposedly some people near here did feel this one. I don't know if they were perhaps outside, just more sensitive than I am, or completely full of crap. I was sitting quietly at my computer working at the time. That said, I was upstairs, rather on the ground floor, so perhaps that had an effect.

Okay, so not a major quake, but a rarity for here. But the whole thing has got me thinking about disasters. I wonder what's next? Last year we had smoke from forest fires role in from hundreds of miles away in Canada. I'm thinking meteor strike. Earth is due for a wake up call like the 1908 explosion in Tunguska Russia.

[Danster]

We, as a species, got lucky in that that happened over Siberia. But then thinking about it, the vast majority of the Earth's surface is uninhabited, so if it was to happen again the odds are it would be either over an ocean, ice or a sparsely populated patch of land. So maybe it wasn't that lucky?

[General Ceel]

In recent decades they've located more and more large craters, both under the ice and under the water.

[Danster]

I read something a while ago that we know more about the surface of Mars than we do the bottoms of our deepest oceans.

[General Ceel]

^yeah, I've heard variations on that for decades.