The BBC news page reports 2 dead and 20 injured , mainly due to falling roofs. it shows a short video clip showing the shaking and subsequent damage. The European-Mediterranean Seismological site reports some 26 subsequent earthquakes / aftershocks in the area.

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As the events of the day unfolded and the casualty list grew from an initial count of zero 9at 09:30 to over 8000 by 5pm I was reminded of the most penetrating question ever asked of a physics teacher "Sir, when there is a big earthquake are you happy or sad" (asked by a young student of Stewart Bullen's many years ago). This morning when I first saw the email about this event I thought "Oh No" because big earthquakes in China have a record of causing massive casualties. I was initially reassured by the BBC, but as the true extent of this tragedy unfolded I became dismayed and saddened by the tragedy of the event.

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This is the trace from WINWM just south of Birmingham. We also got a count of almost 30,000.

It's good to see a trace like this, but it's going to be a human tragedy.

http://www.scispace.net/daveb/files/-1/632/China+earthquake.JPG

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I managed to look at the PAUL trace this morning (because it is automatically uploaded to IRIS ftp site).   Everything you see from 22:40 to midnight is signal from the 22:33 M7.2 event.    The surface waves in particular spread out with the whole extended wavetrain being caused by the original event (technically the extended wavetrain is called the "coda" and is caused partly by multipathing ... waves travelling different routes to get to the same end point and also dispersion .. where wave components of different frequencies travel at different speeds with the longest wavelngths travelling fastest)

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I was just checking my e-mails last night when the earthquake alert came through , i checked the trace on PAUL and the 22 hor log was there, the trace of the event showed quite clearly, didn't really need filtering, thought I'll check that in the morning .......the trace now displayed is not as clear as the earlier trace is this because of the aftershocks at 22:50 5.3, 23;12 5.5 ?? I notice there has been a series of other aftershocks today of about level 5,  00;20, 04:03 and 06:16. moral being..."don't put of till tomorrow.....

 

Pete Hill

 Paulet

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Good news about the press coverage - I must get something together for STED, but I suspect its a bit late now. This is a test to see if I can post behind the SWGfL Firewall... So far seems okay...

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