Covering ground: The August 23 earthquake, which had an epicenter in central Virginia, was felt all the way up in New York City, where Scientific American's offices were temporarily evacuated.
Image: U.S. Geological Survey
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NEW YORK CITY—A magnitude 5.8 earthquake that shook parts of the mid-Atlantic U.S. and New England Tuesday afternoon sent workers and residents streaming outdoors. In Lower Manhattan, surrounding the Scientific American office, vehicle traffic quickly came to a standstill—with New York Police Department officers ordering drivers to back their vehicles out of the Holland Tunnel. People streamed out onto the sidewalks and into neighborhood cafes as buildings were evacuated as a precautionary measure.
Officials in Washington, D.C., fewer than 160 kilometers from the quake's epicenter near Mineral, Va., closed all national monuments. And many office buildings in the nation's capital remained closed to business as of Tuesday afternoon.
Most U.S. quakes occur in Alaska and California, but the East Coast is no stranger to temblors, with fault lines running throughout the area. The U.S. Geological Survey, however, had rated the probability of a quake larger than magnitude 5.7 occurring in the Richmond, Va., area in the next 100 years as less than 20 percent.
The Virginia quake followed a rare magnitude 5.3 rattler in southern Colorado.
Here are images from the area near our office, adjacent to an entrance to the Holland Tunnel in Lower Manhattan, taken within 10 minutes of the Virginia quake. Did you document the event? Share your photos, videos and accounts at submit@sciam.com or post them to our Facebook wall.
» View slide show of scenes after the East Coast earthquake.
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6 Comments
Add CommentThe hippy, hippy shake ( The Beatles )
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, you're saying your god is punishing innocent people through natural disasters because some people don't respect others? That's the kind of god I want to worship, let me tell you! Goooooo, god!!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMost probably, natural disasters are unavoidable. However, the las big Tsunami in Asia reminded us that many animals had some kind of feeling that something was about to happen, their change in behaviour warning men there and allowing them to take preventive measures that finally saved their lives. If we hadn't commited the original sin, we won't have lost the ability to sense beforehand such natural events, and would have been able to avoid its negative consequences. Anyway, we die, be it for pneumonia, a wild animal, another man, becoming too elderly or from a thunderstorm doesn't change the subject at all.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm all for a literalist exegetical interpretation of Genesis, but you've raised it to a whole new level. So you're basically saying, jgrosay, that if Adam and Eve hadn't sinned in the Garden of Eden, and a tsunami was approaching, their natural instincts would have warned them to run for the hills?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSince they sinned according to Genesis, are you saying that if a tsunami was approaching, the animals would have fled (with the sound of flocks of birds taking flight from the canopy) but Adam and Eve would have just sat there looking at each other as if to say, "What the heck..."?
I dunno, even Billy Graham might have a few questions for you on that interpretation.
Yikes! That earthquake this week knocked the spires off the National Cathedral and cracked the Washington Monument. If you were even a little bit superstitious you might think someone was really mad!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisERROR in description of slide 8. Probability is actually 0.02 which is 2% not 20%
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this