Earthquake?!

Around 9 or 10pm last night, I thought I had a tiny spell of dizzyness. It lasted for maybe a second. It kinda reminded me of the time I was washing dishes back home in California a couple years ago when I experienced the same sensation, but that time it was followed by a lot of rumbling and shaking. Hmmm. I paused to take more sensory data... Could that have been an...? Na. It couldn't have been. Must have been a plough or snomobile rumbling past the dorm.

Well, I think I might have been wrong. At about 4 am this morning, I was sharply awakened by a rhythmic side to side shaking. I was being rocked back and forth in my bed! The whole place was shaking - but it was so strange...there was periodicity in the movements of everything. At that point I knew immediately I was in the middle of an earthquake! A couple seconds later, it stopped, but not before it had "walked" my bed about 6-7 inches away from the wall! I recall 4 or 5 people waking up and walking about in the hall exclaiming their shock about what we had just experienced. You can see in the picture below that my bed isn't flush with the wall...I can assure you it was when I went to bed that night.



As it turned out, the earthquake we felt was the largest in Norwegian history, a magnitude 6.2, just southeast of Svalbard 10 km below the surface of the ocean. There was no visible damage anywhere in town, and I did not hear of anyone having trouble. Lucky for us in Nybyen that the huge overhangs of snow above us on the valley ridge didn't come tumbling down...