Dubai Earthquake Tremor Shock Horror

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There I am minding my own business yesterday and then wooah what was that? It's a strange feeling, like the ground just liquefied, your gut sort of goes googly and the Masafi on your desk is doing interference patterns. And you realise you're sitting in a skyscraper.

This is never a good time for the imaginative or fancifully inclined.

5.2 on the Moment Magnitude Scale, 10km below the island of Qeshm (which must have been a much more interesting place yesterday than Dubai), off the Iranian coast, the quake is by no means the first such event: recent major quakes taking place there include two biggies in 2005 and 2008.

By the way, I still call it the Richter Scale (as did most of the reporting media) but that's wrong. The MMS is a new scale developed to supercede the Richter Scale in the 1970s and although it uses a similar number scale to denote bigness, it's different to the one formulated by Mr Richter in the 1930s. Who knew?

Thirteen people died in the 2005 event (although Qeshm is relatively sparsely populated) which was a 5.8 event followed by 400 aftershocks. Another seven died in 2008, with a 5.9 event. Luckily there were no reports of casualties or fatalities from the Iranian News Agency yesterday. Note to self: don't buy a house on Qeshm.

Apparently Iran in general gets an average quake a day, sitting as it does on the convergence of the Arabian and Eurasian tectonic plates. Qeshm is a pretty criss-cross of anticlines and synclines - the region's complex geology is one of the reasons why we have all that lovely oil in the Gulf.

Twitter was fun to watch, Gulf News breathlessly tweeting that it was going to write a story about the event soon which was, if I am not much mistaken, a first. Watch this space because there's going to be some news about the news everyone's talking about already. Cool.

And some people left their buildings to stand next to them because it's clearly safer to be under a building than in it when the quake hits and everything falls over. This the media called 'evacuating'. Emirates 24x7 informed us that Sharjah Police had tweeted there was no damage, which was another new low for me. Like I need an online newspaper to tell me what Twitter's saying. Grief.

Anyway, I found this, which is quite cute. It's like FlightTracker but for earthquakes. So you can know when your earthquake has arrived. Or you can go to the horse's mouth - the National Centre for Meteorology and Seismology (say that after a long night).

Or maybe just go back to work and get over it, which is pretty much what we did.

What Earthquake?

Iran: Caravanserai (Photo credit: Erwin Bolwidt)

And... breathe.

It's odd to be back. It always is. There's a surreal quality to it all, wrenched away from the sunny cold of the unseasonably late UK cold snap and the bustle of family and friends back to the warm air and glitter of glass.  As usual, I didn't sleep at all on the 'red eye' flight, watching The Hobbit (quite fun) and Jack Reacher (woeful) instead.

We got home, unpacked and turned in. And proceeded to sleep through what was, today's media breathlessly assures us, the biggest earthquake to hit Iran in fifty years. The 7.8 magnitude quake shook the UAE, causing buildings to be evacuated - Gulf News found an expert who estimated the tremors that shook the UAE were equivalent to a 4.5 quake here, which does seem rather implausible, but an expert's an expert.

On the Pakistan/Iran border, near the city of Zahedan, the quake is said to have killed and injured many in both countries, although official figures appear sketchy (Iran says anything between zero and fifty dead, depending on who you listen to, while Pakistan says between four and thirty-five killed). Twitter was all a-flurry, of course.

Not that we cared, all we felt was zeds.

Meanwhile, I'm catching up with emails and clients (the day job) and contemplating tonight's 'More Talk' taking place at the Dubai International Financial Centre's More Café. Saturday is going to be busy, too - I'm doing two workshops and a reading as part of The Archive Dubai's 'Day of Books' all-day event as well as appearing on Dubai Eye Radio's 'Talking of Books' programme.

That upcoming radio appearance explains why I found a copy of Edward Rutherfurd's forthcoming novel 'Paris' on my desk when I got to work (the building was, I was glad to see, still standing). I can't say the sight filled my heart with stuff - my last 'Talking of Books' read was Jack Whyte's appalling 'Rebel', 600 pages of awful cod-Scottish dialogue and pointless meandering plot that I waded through with a black heart and weary eyes.

It's not just earthquakes I'm good at missing. Being back in the UK I managed to miss last week's TOB broadcast, which is a shame as Beirut - An Explosive Thriller was their 'Book of the Week'. I can only hope it didn't cause the programme's reviewers the pain having to read 'Rebel' caused me.

Now I've got Rutherfurd's 670 page epic to digest in a little over two days. Worst of all, the book's not published yet, so I can't get a Kindle copy. I've got to read it as a papery thing. What larks, Pip...