Earthquake tremors rattle SU hill

Sara Brodowski was typing away on her MacBook Pro in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications' Collaborative Media Room when she noticed something out of the ordinary.

The media management graduate student's fingers were shaking on the keyboard, so she looked around to see what caused the commotion. 

"I thought it was someone stomping around," Brodowski said. 

But the real catalyst wasn't a rowdy student. It was an earthquake.

Syracuse.com reported that a 5.0-magnitude quake near Ottawa, Canada, sent aftershocks from Ontario all the way to Maryland, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Immediately after the light shake, which lasted mere seconds, the Twittersphere was buzzing with personal anecdotes. 

"There are very small earthquakes beneath us all the time. We just don't feel them," Jeffrey Karson, department chairperson of earth sciences at Syracuse University, said via e-mail. Karson said earthquakes are felt at great distances. Even a 4.0-magnitude earthquake would be felt up to 100km away. 

"The intensity of shaking depends to some extent on what is underneath you," Karson continued.  "That might account for the differences in how it was felt."

While this wasn't Syracuse's first go-around with earthquakes, they're still very rare for the region.

Did you feel it?