It may seem strange that magnitude-7 quakes went unnoticed for so long--a temblor of similar size leveled entire towns and killed at least 15,000 in Turkey in 1999--but 1999--but 1999--butthe Whillans Ice Stream never notice the shaking.
There are some signs of a temblor in Herakleion, too.
On the afternoon of Saturday, April 25th, a temblor, as Halifax put it, "tore the heart out of Nepal".
The Great Hanshin Earthquake, a cataclysmic temblor of magnitude 7.2, devastated the city, claimed some 6,000 lives, injured more than 30,000 persons, left some 300,000 persons homeless, and temporarily closed the world's busiest port.
The quake was the worst natural disaster in Indonesia since a temblor in the central Javanese city of Yogyakarta killed 6,000 people in 2006.
The first attribute goes a long way in explaining how so much of Santiago withstood a temblor that was hundreds of times stronger than the one that flattened Haiti's capital in January.
In 2009, a temblor killed more than 300 people in the central city of L'Aquila, where the historic center is still largely uninhabited and in ruins.
The last temblor of that size occurred at Cape Ann, off the coast of Massachusetts, in 1755.
Centered about nine miles south of wine country's Napa at 3 20 a.m., the earthquake was the largest to strike the Bay Area since the 6.9 Loma Prieta temblor of 1989, the U.S. Geological Survey said, and it lasted 10 to 20 seconds, depending on "where you were located exactly".
