Earthquake near Basel!

Well that was wild! I was sitting in bed when it suddenly started wobbling from side to side. My first thought was that the fan had made it shake, but that didn’t really make sense in terms of the amount of shaking that was going on. Then it kept going, and wobbling like someone was actively oscillating the bed; it was like the flat had been placed on top of a giant washing machine on a spin cycle!

My SO also looked confused. She had, like me, thought it was the fan causing some trouble or something, but also realised that that didn’t make any sense.

Turns out a magnitude ~4.6 earthquake hit the neighbouring town of Mulhouse!!

That’s the weirdest, most unnerving thing I’ve ever experienced! (Doesn’t help that with the current geopolitical sitch, I thought it was either an earthquake or the shakes of someone having snapped and launched the nukes. Thankfully it was “just” the former…)

A delivery driver on a bike was standing outside looking equally confused. I can’t imagine how weird it must have been cycling when everything was moving… Everyone’s fine (although extremely weirded out) as far as I can tell, so that’s a relief.

I went to Japan in 2018 and didn’t experience any earthquakes. But seemingly, if you don’t come to the earthquakes, the earthquakes (eventually) come to you…

Thomas Ekström Hansen
Thomas Ekström Hansen
PhD student in Computer Science

My interests include information visualisation, formal methods, and low-level programming.

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