Re: Yesterday’s Fuel Storage Depot Explosion

I was safe in Wales, but my friend Steve was 40 miles away in Oxford:

It was 6:02am this morning. I was awoken by the rattling of my house’s roof tiles and the creaking of the roof timbers.

My immediate reaction was “That was a shock wave!” I knew that it had to be quite some way off because the shockwave lasted for at least a couple of seconds and hence had had time to disperse. I knew something big had happened but hadn’t deduced what.

…and continues at [www.livejournal.com] ; it’s an interesting exposition of what happens when a geek wakes up to a really really loud bang.

I wonder if it registered on seismometers, and what the TNT-tonne equivalent was, if an appreciable amount at all?

Comments

4 responses to “Re: Yesterday’s Fuel Storage Depot Explosion”

  1. Stephen Usher
    re: Re: Yesterday’s Fuel Storage Depot Explosion

    Actually, it did register on our department’s seismometer as a single, longish wavelength wiggle. It wasn’t very big though.

  2. Nik
    re: Re: Yesterday’s Fuel Storage Depot Explosion

    News reports on BBC this morning claimed it registered 2.5 on the Richter scale but didn’t specify a source, so it may just be line noise…

  3. Stephen Usher
    re: Re: Yesterday’s Fuel Storage Depot Explosion

    Well, technically, the Richter Scale can only be applied to small earthquakes. Basically, the scale is a logarithmic scale of the solid earth acceleration and it only goes up to 3.

    The earthquake magnitude scale, which is the one often quoted as being the “Richter Scale” is based upon the aforementioned scale in that it’s logarithmic and, for small earthquakes, has a similar result. This measures the total energy released by the event. Each integer increase in value is a factor of 30x the previous integer value.

  4. Nik
    re: Re: Yesterday’s Fuel Storage Depot Explosion

    Fascinating; never knew that. Thanks!

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