It’s probably a little late to be blogging about the earthquake that rattled the eastern United States on August 23, but a former neighbor in Arlington, Virginia just sent me an interesting clipping from the Washington Post. It’s the “Urban Jungle” column from Sept. 6. You can read the whole piece here, (click on Week 1 for September) but the graphic is so good that I’ve posted it below. It’s a great comparison of the destructive force of the 5.8-magnitude Virginia quake (the tiny dot in the lower left) compared to the 9.0-magnitude earthquake that struck Japan on March 11 (the huge ball):
The “7.0” ball in the middle is the earthquake that hit Haiti in January 2010.
My older son, a third-year student at the University of Virginia,was front and center during the U.S. quake. For a kid who grew up in Tokyo, the U.S quake was “a non-event” although he did say he “almost burst a vein watching the sorority girls hugging and crying in the parking lot” of his apartment building after they ran out from the shaking. He’s got a great sense of irony and sent me this picture:
Alice Gordenker アリス・ゴーデンカー 