Whoa! Fuck!

A fairly-massive earthquake off Ferndale about half-an-hour ago — according to the USGS, a 6.5 jarred a spot about 115 miles west/southwest of where I’m located.
At the time, I was enjoying my initial cup of coffee, and my first cigarette of the day — didn’t feel a thing, so a shock to see it on the USGS site.
So far, from local media no reports of damage or anything.

Supposedly nearly 13 km in depth, so maybe a lot of the force was extended groundward.

(Illustration found here)

Now, both Lost Coast Outpost and Redheaded Blackbelt have stories up — read the comments to get the picture of the quake’s reach. Some here in Mckinleyville did feel the shake, but so far no crazy shit.

Start the day, huh?

UPDATE

Off the big quake earlier, I’d figured there’d be some kind of continuous reaction to it, and was anticipating aftershocks — another hour-or-so later, sure enough, at 8:32 a goodly-sized 5.2 aftershock, and a minute later, a 4.9, but I felt neither.

At LoCO, an interview with Lori Dengler, Professor Emeritus at Humboldt State University, and local seismology expert. This morning’s shaker just a normal roll — in a nutshell:

Dengler was quick to point out that this quake posed no tsunami danger due to its size, distance from the shore and nature of the quake.
She described this earthquake as a strike-slip quake, meaning the two sides slipped past each other like traffic on a highway. This type of quake is less likely to generate a tsunami.

And a bit of scary: ‘She pointed out that while there is no reason to expect this morning’s quake could trigger the feared subduction zone quake, it is of course is a possibility. However, that expected quake could occur anytime between today and 200 years from now.’

Above-mentioned ‘subduction zone quake,’ however, is indeed a scary fright:

The Cascadia Subduction Zone runs from northern California to British Columbia, and scientists say it can be roughly divided into four segments.
There have been 43 major earthquakes in the past 10,000 years on this subduction zone, sometimes on the entire zone at once and sometimes only on parts of it.
When the entire zone is involved, it’s believed to be capable of producing a magnitude 9.1 earthquake.

Yeah…