You might find these seismogram traces boring or uninterpretable, but I find them to be really cool. Thanks USGS. Each of these traces represents one station from somewhere in the continental US, with the ones closer to the bottom being located further from the source (near Niigata, Japan). The earthquake is not unique in any way, it just happened to be large enough to both cause damage and be detected by multiple stations in the US. If you are lucky enough to have a MacBook like me, I recommend this nifty piece of software which is both cool and helpful in understanding the different types of earthquakes and ground motion that are possible by using the built-in gyro. And if you happen to live in earthquake prone areas (unlike me) you can have your very own desk seismograph.

I was going to use part of this column to talk about what a great job Japan has done in building earthquake resistant structures, but now I see that my previous conclusions were a little hasty. Maybe Japan should reconsider building more nuclear reactors to supply electricity.