Christchurch earthquake: From the blogosphere

Experts in the blogosphere are helping many understand what caused the Christchurch earthquake, while others are simply sharing their experiences of the disaster. Photo / Mark Mitchell.

Bloggers and twitter posters alike have been prolific in the wake of the Christchurch earthquake.

Some are simply recounting their experience as the quake it, and the aftermath that followed, while others of a more scientific bent are delving beneath the surface to examine what actually happened and why, or assembling maps to help us see how the whole disaster unfolded.

If you have seen something interesting about the quake online that you think we should share with nzherald.co.nz readers,Please let us know and don't forget to include a link.

Quake tweet collection

The respected search engine blog AskKalena has collected some of the

first Twitter posts

from the Christchurch earthquake - some even posted during the disaster.

The tweet collection goes from right after the quake hit, with @mrsgooding's "OMG. Strong earthquake in Christchurch! Power is out! Can still feel aftershocks. Scary! Stay safe everyone!" through to realisation of the level of damage the city faced "Power still out. Aftershakes still rattling us. Anyone need help?" (@Craig_Forster).

Relief came when news filtered through that nobody had been killed, @crashhelmet tweeted on Sunday: "Surreal day after the earthquake. My poor town is a bit battered and bruised. So glad no fatalities. A miracle really"

Going home

Blogger James Dann was surprised by how little damage done to his inner-city apartment when he was given access to the building, he writes on the informative

Rebuilding Christchurch blog

, but was impressed by how well the security operation in the CBD was working.

"The sheer size of the security operation in the CBD is mind-boggling," he writes. "On Saturday, I couldn't believe that the police had any 'Police Emergency - DO NOT CROSS' tape left. Now, I'm in awe of all the temporary fences that have popped up.

"At the one I arrived at, there were four army men, or boys. Baby-faced recruits - some of them look 17 or 18 - who look as confused by the situation as I do. The constant presence of the army, their vehicles, and the police certainly takes the tension up to another level. "

Survival miracle

Geoffrey Lean, environmental correspondent for the British

Telegraph

was

amazed that there were no deaths as a result of the earthquake

, noting how "wealthy countries and communities suffer much less from a given natural disaster than poor ones".

"The quake was the same magnitude, 7.1 on the Richter Scale as the one that hit Haiti in January, and its epicentre was slightly closer to Christchurch than the Caribbean one was from Port au Prince (13, as against 16, miles).But the latest estimates reckon that some 230,000 people died in Haiti, compared to no-one in New Zealand."

Quakeonomic doubts

The Standard's economics blogger Marty G doubted that the touted economic boost as the Canterbury region hits rebuild mode would actually

last in the long term

.

"Once the rebuilding is over, there will be little to show for it," he wrote on the Standard website. "The boost of the rebuilding itself will not be permanent and will contribute little to long-term production capacity. Once the rebuilding is over, the GDP boost will disappear.

Science speak

New Zealand's

here

.

Grant Jacobs blogged throughout the entire disaster on the SciBlogs website, providing images and information as it came to hand. See Grant's full report

here

.

Chris McDowell went one step further and wrote a programme to parse GeoNet's data and generate a storyboard of maps to follow seismic activity around the region on Saturday. The results can be found

here

. Animated versions of Chris' work can be found

here

.

Geotripper, an American blog focussed on geology notes similarities between the Canterbury fault and California's active San Andreas fault line.

"There are some similarities between the South Island of New Zealand and California," writes blogger Garry Hayes, "The Alpine Fault is a large scale strike-slip fault system like the San Andreas, which is capable of producing large earthquakes in the range of magnitude 8." Read more

here

.

Google view

The Google Earth blog has linked to a great timeline of the quake using GNS (GeoNet) data to show quakes and aftershocks. Follow the jump

here

to download a .kmz file which can then be opened from the 'File' menu of Google Earth and all will be revealed.