Earthquake relief t-shirts

My friend is selling t-shirts to commemorate the 4 September earthquake in Christchurch, with 10% of the profits going to help out those most affected by the quake. Check them out at www.snowpool.org.nz/t-shirt.php

Geologising

On a less destructive note, last weekend H and I went on a geologising trip up to Motonau Beach to see if we could find anything cool.
It was a beautiful day and a nice beach with some pretty awesomely steep and pointy sand cliffs. We found quite a few crab fossils that are waiting on the rock shelf of death to be extracted.

There were also some pretty awesome bivalves, both external and internal casts.

Hopefully more geologising to happen soon. H and his geeky geology friends are off mapping liquefaction around the city after the earthquake. Apparently there are some monster sand volcanoes out there!

Earthquake!

Yesterday morning we were woken up at 4:35 am by a 7.1 earthquake! Quite violent shaking that seemed to go on for quite a long time. Never quite made it out of bed and under the doorway but H had to hold onto the bookcase to prevent it falling over and disgorging its contents of rocks on top of us. The aftershocks keep rumbling on some 30 hours later, some of them quite big in themselves. Amazingly our part of town seems to have suffered little damage and we got off pretty lightly, losing only a couple of wineglasses and my car ending up under the neighbour's chimney! The bonnet is buggered and the radiator is toast, so I'm not sure how fixable it will be.

Amazingly, the 60 glass jars on the cupboard above the fridge stayed put and the fish (Gobius and Beluga), Milred the muscle and Steve the snail only lost a little bit of water from their tank. Badger, the cat, is still quite freaked out but an excellent aftershock predictor. If he takes off for his hole under the house, there's expect the earth to move. But it could have been much worse. Parts of the rest of the city have been quite badly damaged, with sides of buildings crumbling, roads with gaping holes and many houses still without power, water or sewerage. (Photos)

It is kinda surreal - looking out my window it is really hard to believe that there is so much damage just a few km away. Most of my friends seems to have survived without too much damage (besides the contents of their kitchen's ending up on the floor). All in all, we've been pretty lucky.