New Zealand Earthquake - eye-witness accounts and photos...

When the earthquake in New Zealand happened, on the 14th November, I was aware of it within a few seconds. My friend Simon, who lives in Wellington had been woken up by the quake (it was a couple of minutes after midnight) and added a message on Facebook saying:

"Holy crap, that was scary..."

The size of the earthquake was quickly upgraded to over 7...

Aftershocks kept coming, and Simon said he was in for a rocky night ahead, and had actually turned the GeoNet app off, as it was sending an alert so frequently. By the end of the next day there had been over 1000 aftershocks.

He posted a few images that started to appear, and some memes too, such as the ones below:

These included content from stuff, and also images from friends and other local media. These were not only useful to me, but also provided links through to other useful sources of images and information.

There is an excellent set of resources on the GA website, which was curated by Stephen Schwab, but I wanted to add a few other ideas
Here are some of Simon's images in a Flickr album - more to come I hope as Simon continues to explore the affected area.



I've also obtained a seismogram from our school seismometer showing the trace from the earthquake.

This is an earthquake that might well feature in quite a few geography lessons to come... particularly the dramatic sea level uplift near Kaikoura, which has fears over its future tourism income as the summer season is on the way...