Last night we felt our third significant earthquake. I feel the need to report about it here to be informative as well as for posterity. This earthquake, with a magnitude of 5.0, was quite a jolt. Unlike other quakes we've felt this one was intensely strong and then dissipated, where others built in intensity.
Our previous experiences (all two of them) told our brains that the quake would get stronger so I was pretty frightened for a moment. We jumped up from the dinner table and I said "drop and cover!" (my school's emergency training kicking in) but by the time we reacted the quake had dissipated. So we walked out to the balcony to see our pool sloshing, which was really cool.
All my geeky research explains that the difference in each earthquakes is the depth at which it originates. A shallow quake, like this one, produces a strong jolt that is felt at a smaller radius than a deep quake. Deep quakes, like the one we felt last summer, rumble for miles and miles and can be felt in waves.
Yay earthquakes!