The Aftershock Jitters

It starts with a rumble.  And it may end there.  But then there might also be a few jolts, or just general low level shaking.  Nothing like this morning.  At first I didn't pay much attention, knowing in my head that they were just aftershocks.  But my body isn't always attached to my head, and it's starting to perk up with each initial rumble.  It seems to be viscerally asking, "Is this a nothing, or is this going to be more serious?"

I looked at the earthquake label on this blog.  I found eight posts with a magnitude level listed in the title - from 4.1 to 6.2 - since 2012.  (There were other earthquake posts as well.) My point is that they were significant enough to get me to blog about them.  We've already had more than eight aftershocks in that range already.  

Notice, the listing below was 7 hours after the big quake, or at about 3:30 pm.  It's 1 am as i write this.

Here's a map showing the magnitude 7.0 along with all of the aftershocks we reviewed in the 7 hours after the quake. Most aftershocks have not yet been reviewed and are not on this map, but these precise locations give a good overview of the sequence so far. pic.twitter.com/FM7oZL7t4n

— AK Earthquake Center (@AKearthquake) December 1, 2018

(Anchorage is that pig snout just below the lowest red dot.)

A follow up Tweet says:

"The little black dots on the map are just a way of showing what the background seismicity looks like. It's all of the historic earthquakes larger than magnitude 2, not scaled for magnitude."

And then t0here's this, which is base, I guess, on the premise that knowledge is a good thing, that we'll be comforted knowing what's ahead.  Part of me agrees.  Another part says a 4% chance of another 7,0 sway too high.