A Call to Duty for Armchair Geologists

Debris covers the floor of the Miller's Mart food store in Mineral, Va. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

Many of you Geeks felt the rumbling around 2pm Eastern time yesterday, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake centered just outside of Mineral, VA. (The [GAS] staff didn’t feel a thing, until the Internets exploded with reports and our speakers started vibrating with incoming media notifications.) If you’re anywhere on the East Coast and you felt the tremors, you can help geologists understand the seismic event better by reporting your experience to the USGS. Scientific American‘s Steve Mirsky has the rundown:

[Y]ou can help researchers learn more about the quake. If you were in any of the affected areas—from Georgia to Toronto and west to Ohio—go to the website of the United States Geological Survey, the USGS. Go to their earthquake page, earthquake.usgs.gov. There you’ll see an item called Did You Feel It?, where you can share your location and your estimate of the strength of the shaking. If like me you didn’t feel anything, enter that too—it’s all valuable.

Your info will help create a Community Internet Intensity Map that can provide important data about the scope of the quake and contribute to ongoing earthquake research. That’s earthquake.usgs.gov

—Steve Mirsky, Scientific American