Just before 9 a.m., on 9 January 1982, residents of the Canadian province of New Brunswick experienced an earthquake. 1 No serious damage occurred, although people reported walls swaying back and forth, dishes knocked out of cupboards, and toilet seats vibrating. The initial tremor registered a fairly high value of 5.9 on the Richter scale, but seismologists later indicated that damage was minimal because the earthquake's epicenter was not located in an urban area and the tremors were deep underground. The vibrations were felt over a large area including Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Maine, and parts of Massachusetts. For several months after, scientific instruments recorded hundreds of lesser tremors.
Scientific investigations of earthquakes have been concerned principally with prediction aimed at minimizing the physical and human costs resulting from naturally occurring disasters. Some socialscientific research has explored the responses of communities and civil organizations to the damage following an earthquake (Committee on the Alaska Earthquake, 1970;Takuma, 1978). A few psychological studies have considered the relationship between one's perception of tremors and individual personality traits (DeNevi, 1977;Fried, 1973). No attention has been given, however, to the experiential nature of tremors. The New Brunswick case is especially relevant since the last significant earthquake occurred there over a century ago. Because few people knew that eastern Canada has a fault zone, most residents experienced the first tremor as unexpected, novel, and unexplainable. Subsequent tremors confirmed that an earthquake had occurred; moreover, vibrations were felt by people and recorded by instruments for several months. This essay explores the experiential nature of earthquakes o One goal