Half an hour before ground-breaking festivities for the Environmental Studies Center were scheduled to start Friday afternoon, another sort of groundbreaking was taking place beneath the Ohio-Pennsylvania border.
An earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter scale hit near Sharon, Pennsylvania at 3:53 p.m. Friday. No injuries or serious structural damage were reported. Had the epicenter been in Ohio, the earthquake would have been the second largest on record in the state.
Chief geologist at the Ohio Geological Survey Tom Berg noted that Friday's earthquake was near Greenville, Pennsylvania, the location of a sizable earthquake in the 1930's. Scientists have not yet pinpointed a specific fault as the cause of Friday's earthquake, however.
"We do know that the quake occurred along a system of faults running southeast-northwest through the area," said Waverly Person, a spokesperson for the United States Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado.
Because earthquakes are rare in the eastern United States, many Oberlin inhabitants initially mistook the tremors for something else. Some students who felt the earthquake said it felt like a large truck passing by. Others just didn't know what to make of it.
"I was lying on my bed listening to my stereo when suddenly my room started shaking. I thought to myself, 'goddamn, my stereo has some great frigging bass,'" said college first-year Mike Lebovitz.
"My laptop started to rattle around and my chair started to shake. I didn't know we had earthquakes in Ohio, and I'd never been in one before, so I didn't know what was going on. I thought I was crazy," said college sophomore Tonie Tyler.
Still, many students did not feel Friday's tremors. "I took a straw poll in my Environmental Geology class Tuesday and only a quarter to a third of the 60 students had even noticed the earthquake," said Professor of Geology Bruce Simonson.
"I was playing the piano on the third floor of the Conservatory when the piano started shaking. I thought maybe it was some sort of weird pipe problem in the Con's walls, so I kept playing. I didn't figure it out until later, when someone told me there had been an earthquake," said college sophomore Brendan Cooney.
Seismically active regions like California usually lie on the boundaries between the large plates which make up the earth's crust. Earthquakes in such regions are caused by the grinding and scraping of these plates against one another. Earthquakes like Friday's, which occurred in the middle of the North American plate, are much harder to explain.
"We still don't understand intraplate earthquake systems very well," said Steve Wojtal, professor of geology. "It's much harder to figure out which earthquakes are related to each other because they happen much less frequently than earthquakes along plate boundaries."
Although the idea of an earthquake in the Midwest may surprise many students, some of the strongest earthquakes in United States history struck near New Madrid, Missouri in the winter of 1811 to 1812. Three of these earthquakes are estimated to have been magnitude eight or greater on the Richter scale, and were felt throughout the Eastern United States, even ringing church bells in Boston.
"People don't seem to think we have earthquakes in the eastern United States, which is ridiculous," said Simonson. "This is the third one I've felt in Oberlin since I got here in 1979."
Copyright © 1998, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 127, Number 5, October 2, 1998
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