[ad_1]
If you’re on vacation, at the beach, and the sea breeze is blowing through your curly hair, then yes, for sure. I like the fluffy feeling of being in the middle of soft waves.
But as I was sitting on the couch in the middle of the living room holding my 6-month-old niece, the house started to move out from under us? No, thanks.
Like most East Coast residents, Friday’s magnitude 4.8 earthquake felt like it came out of nowhere. In addition to eating better, genuine Keeping our feet on the ground as the seasons change is one of the reasons we prefer living here to the sunshine and seismic activity of the West Coast. Jersey doesn’t have rattling earthquakes that cause pictures to fall off the walls.
Now that this extraordinary thing has happened, we are completely engulfed by it. I’ve sent and received more texts than I’d like to admit, exchanging war stories about 20-second roars. I searched on Google so I was confident enough in my earthquake expertise to discuss earthquakes with my friends and family. That’s what we talked about over dinner.
And social media, as it often does, pointed out to me that this wild event was not isolated. Below is a timeline of some serious and bizarre content.
Wednesday, April 3 – The Statue of Liberty is struck by lightning and Dan Martland captures a stunning photo of her looking like a pop star in the middle of a fireworks-enhanced show.
Friday, April 5th – My baby and I, and about 42 million other people, are literally couch surfing during an earthquake.
Monday, April 8 – Take off your glasses, kids. It’s time for a solar eclipse.
Naturally, the internet now thinks the world is ending.
I’ll admit that I enjoyed scrolling through all the memes, witty comments, and nasty bickering on social media about the confluence of these events. I especially liked the posters that said this was all a “next-level Ghostbusters marketing strategy” or predicted that aliens would be coming to pick us up next week.
All of this got me thinking about why, when faced with strange (and thankfully, in cases like this, not really destructive) events, we quickly move toward end-of-the-world scenarios. I did. We all get the joke about the guy who posted the Godzilla meme – what happens next when this is all over?!
I texted Brandon Valeriano, a Seton Hall professor and all-around smart guy with a sense of humor, and asked him what he thought. He pointed out to me that his three incidents that I mentioned were not as sudden as they seemed.
AccuWeather reports that the Statue of Liberty is actually struck by lightning several times a year.
Moderate earthquakes are rare here, but they do occur. You probably get the little ones much more often than you think. (New Jersey has experienced 28 earthquakes in the past 17 years.) And an even stronger magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck Virginia in 2011 also shook us in New Jersey and New York. Ta.
And while solar eclipses don’t always happen, they are a normal part of the planet’s rotation and are completely predictable.
So why is X (ex-Twitter) saying we have high hopes for it?
Professor Valeriano said we use humor and conspiracy theories to understand the world.
“Humans try to find patterns to organize the world, but sometimes what looks like patterns or stripes is actually just something that happens in nature.
“The world is vast and full of complexity,” Valeriano texted me. “Many conspiracies are just a means to establish order.”
Therefore, he believes that we do not need to prepare to be beamed up. that’s good.
But hey, if you guys want, I’ll still wear my pajamas inside out and wish for a snowy May Day. (In fact, he had snow in May in New Jersey in 2020 as well. But 2020 was too unusual to count.)
Our journalism depends on your support.Subscribe now NJ.com.
[ad_2]
Source link
