The Wisdom of Carole King

I feel the earth move under my feet.
-- Carole King/1971

Was drinking my cuppa Joe in my local greasy spoon when the booth shook a bit. It's happened before when one of the local Jaba the Huts fell into the abutting seat. Nothing to write home about. Of course, when I got back and clicked on the pc, there was the news. 4.8 magnitude about 50 miles west of NYC, about 150 miles as the crow flies from where I type these missives. Reported to be felt in DC and Boston; Feuerstein's X feed was where I found out.

Who knew that NE got earthquakes? Turns out, with some regularity, but so small in magnitude that they're rarely felt. Here's why

Quakes on the East Coast can still pack a punch, as its rocks are better than their western counterparts at spreading earthquake energy across far distances.

For the NYC-philes, this comes as no great surprise. Although the fact that there is a distinct fault (not responsible for today's tremor) through the city might. Does to me. Years ago I saw some documentary on NYC, Manhattan in particular, which started with an across-the-Hudson profile of the skyline. It was obvious that it didn't make much sense. Lower on the island is a line of really tall buildings, moving north there's mostly rows of townhouse types, and then still farther north back to tall ones again. Why is that? Turns out that the tall ones are possible because the bedrock pokes up to the surface near the south end of the island, then heading north it dips down for some distance, then up again. It would be very expensive to put piles deep to the bedrock along the dip. So no one bothers.

If you live in NE, or remember your junior high (middle) school social studies (back when you could be taught that, of course), then you know that the Northeast has about the rockiest soils in North America. Getting crops to grow is a major chore. All those neat rock fences you see outside of cities aren't ornamental, they exist because those rocks had to be pulled out of the ground in order to have a semblance of a farm field. Rather than haul them away someplace (the front-loader didn't yet exist in the 1600s), pile them up as a fence.

And, of course the MARF^™(party like it's 1829) lunatics will blame the woke folk for pissing off the Christian God, who punished us with the tremor. I know, I know. We'll just sacrifice a few nubile virgins on a barge in Boston Harbor. God will be mollified.