On...The Lincolnshire Earthquake (or, a little knowledge can be a disturbing thing when you are half-asleep)

At four minutes to one GMT this morning (27th Feb 2008) I was having an interesting dream about flying in an RAF fighter jet. The take-off had been particularly hairy with the pilot nearly clipping trees and buildings and then pulling some interesting low level manoeuvres. I never found out how the dream ended though as I was awoken by the house shaking. It seemed as though a large fleet of heavy-goods vehicles were driving past about a metre from my bedroom wall in an East-West direction. Now sufficiently awake to remember that my bedroom wall is in fact nowhere near a major road and the shaking was of a different nature to anything produced by lorries I concluded that it must, therefore, be an earthquake. My wife told me I had said it was an earthquake and got to the window before the shaking stopped. As the quake only lasted about ten seconds, brain and body must have been in overdrive.

Now you just don't get earthquakes in Lincolnshire. My sleepy brain continued racing. We are nowhere near a tectonic plate boundary, I remembered, and earthquakes in the middle of plates can be severe. However the shaking had quickly stopped and, although alarming, little damage appeared to have been done. But then from the recesses of my mind I recalled (how accurately I don't know without checking) from an oceanography course I had done that off the coast of Norway there is a large unstable undersea slope which could slump if disturbed by an earthquake, displacing a vast quantity of water and inundating the east coast of Britain.

In a sleepy state we seem to be more prone to projecting our fears onto situations, possibly because of an ancient threat-assessment mechanism evolved to wake us up quickly, analyse the situation and plan action if danger threatens. I spoke to my mother this morning and she said she awoke thinking there was a burglar in her house. I had imagined a tsunami. Fortunately both fears turned out to be unfounded and if we had been awake when the quake occurred we probably would have had different thought processes.

[BBC Breakfast News said the earthquake had a magnitude of 5.2. BBC Look North contradicted them and said it was 5.3, but then they may have just been a little excited at having a national news story happening on their doorstep.]