The View of Japan's 9.0 Earthquake from Modesto, California, Part 2

The other day I provided a few screen shots of the seismic record that we captured in Modesto of the Sendai Earthquake in Japan. As I noted in that post, our seismometer is an old teaching model with deeply outmoded computer software, and all I was able to show were some screen shots. Well, I loaded the program on an older computer in the department, transferred the earthquake data to a floppy disk (remember those??), transferred the data onto a third computer where I could transfer the data to a CD-ROM, and finally was able to send the output to a printer. So today I offer the complete record. It's kind of astounding. The top picture is the initial minutes of the quake. You can see the amplitude of the waves rapidly increasing until they were off-scale. The notations on the left are the elapsed minutes, four minutes to the inch.

So what did the whole thing look like? At four minutes per inch, the print job took eight pages. I pasted them together and hung them on the wall, as seen below. This was a big earthquake, as if anyone needed to be told...