Earthquake

Iceland sits astride the mid Atlantic ridge, one of the world's tectonic plate boundaries. The crustal plates here are moving away from each other and as a result we experience earthquakes and eruptions. At around 11pm last evening there was a great booming sound and the house shook and rattled. The 'quake lasted only a few seconds and things quickly returned to normal.
These days whenever we have such an event we quickly look up what happened on a website maintained by the Icelandic met office. It records the signals received from many sensors scattered around the country and updates the website in almost real time. It's an impressive resource and is well worth browsing around.

We learned that last evenings 'quake was just 2.4 on the Richter scale but felt more powerful as it occurred 4.9 kilometres underground and just over three kilometres from where we live. The small red dot just north of Hveragerði on the map shows the location of the earthquake.