Earthquake and the Internet

As some of you may heard, the normally seismically boring Plain States (that's what I'm calling the part of the country where I live) have had a number of tremors over these past few weeks.  The epicenters have been between Oklahoma City and Tulsa and all have scored under 6 on the Richter scale.  This past Saturday evening one of them was large enough that we felt it here in Wichita.

I was mostly asleep and was waken by the shaking of our bed. The shaking was minor enough that I thought one of our dogs had broken out of its kennel and was up on our bed busy trying to relieve an itch.  The fog cleared in  my mind to realize that probably wasn't likely; I then noticed our rafters were popping and cracking like the wind was blowing heavily.  This wind, though, was very rythmic in nature and just so happened to be blowing in a way to match the vibrations of our bed.

My mind was still futily trying to figure out what was going on and I asked my wife if she was casuing this rucus.  I have long suspected her of having superpowers but she flatly denied responsibilty. 

The shaking stopped; she and I stared at each other in the dark, not knowing how to respond. 

"That was an earthquake."  I knew I was right the moment I said it but how to confirm this?  I read a newspaper article yesterday that said over 300 residents of my fair city called 911 to report the news or ask for confirmation.  I was almost one of these but realized the operators probably wouldn't appreciate the call and weren't seismological experts.  Local TV news?  Maybe, but I'd have to get out of bed for that and who knows what they would say.  There was a computer right by the bed so I grabbed it and started trolling the internet looking for an authoritative source that would provide details.  After several minutes of general searching I tried the United States Geological Survey website and a few more mintues after that found this page.

In less that 10 minutes I knew that yes, there had been an earthquake just minutes before, the epicenter was down in Oklahoma and it was significantly larger than many of the recent quakes in the same area.

The USGS has a great website that put the data up quickly.  The internet made the data available quickly.  We had our confusion oblviated quickly and fell back asleep.