Last night I was sitting at my desk marking some tests (again!) when I felt the floor shake a little at ten past eleven. Hey, i thought, an earthquake?! But André thought it felt more like a small explosion.

At a quarter to one – I was still working but André had gone to sleep – the floor shook again. This time I was quite sure it was an earthquake, but the earthquake website for our state (Landesamt für Geologie und Bergbau Rheinland-Pfalz, Erdebenbereignisse) doesn’t update in real time, it seems.

Today, both earthquakes showed up: the one at 23:10 and the one at 0:46 (the times given on the pages are UTC, which is one hour behind us). We live on the lower left corner of those maps, by the way.

The earthquakes had a magnitude of 2.3 and 1.6 respectively, which is not all that much even when the epicenter is only ten or twelve kilometres (about seven or eight miles) away. Take a look at this map of Rhineland-Palatinate (we live a bit to the Northwest of the W in Wiesbaden): Quite a few earthquakes have happened around here between 2000 and now, but we’ve been living here for only a few years, so I still find it noteworthy when one happens.

Maybe I won’t be quite as excited and more scared once I experience one that’s over a 5.0, but fortunately those are very rare here.