earthquake in London

My friend Elizabeth Le Gall was in London for work and was sleeping at my flat yesterday evening so she can testify that I told her at breakfast this morning:

'I think I felt like a small earthquake during the night but I am not sure I wasn't dreaming because it is impossible in London, isn't it? On the other hand dream was so realistic.... I remember distinctly having felt two quakes lasting a few seconds each and the noise of the window glass shaking. I remember thinking half asleep 'OK it's weird, it feels like a small earthquake (like the one I felt in Guadeloupe once) but anything bigger must be very scary ; how do they take it in Japan where bigger ones happen all the ...' then I went back to sleep right away. And when I woke up I thought 'nah it must have been a dream, or a big truck passing in the street, or Satan taking control of my bed'.

Elizabeth agreed, it must have been a dream; she had not felt anything in the other room.

Well it turns out it was not a dream after all. There WAS an earthquake in England at 1am last night. 5.2 on Richter scale. The biggest in 25 years. Nobody else in my office seemed to have felt it at first (to be entirely honest I finally found two other colleagues after asking everybody – 40 people! – which helped me believe it more than BBC News). So here we are: I guess I have ultra sensitive senses (ha! at last I know what my superpower is) OR my house's foundations are bad or the underground of Barnsbury is of a certain soft rock.

An earthquake in London! That sounds ridiculous! I thought I knew enough of geology: UK is far from the borders of the Eurasian plate, far from the touching points with the African plate that mark the only seismic areas of Europe (Turkey, Greece, Algeria, …). Well I was wrong. Everything can happen in the UK. Nobody was killed and the worst damage were a few chimneys and roofs that collapsed near the epicentre in Lincolnshire. An expert on TV said that one level on the Richter scale means 30 times more power, which means scale 8 quakes are about 2700 times more powerful than what we felt last night.

Living in London of course you are used to expect many kinds of disasters as highly likely one day or another:
- terrorist attacks from any kind of popular extremist groups
- financial crises
- wrongdoing from real estate agents
- signal failure on the circle line
- the City and Canary Wharf being flooded following global warning (central London is at sea level)
- and of course, worst of all, the idea of Arsene Wenger resigning as Arsenal manager one day.

…but the last thing we would expect is an earthquake in London.

Earthquake felt across much of UK