And I definitely agree, the 2011 one was more of a sway, this felt like a rumble.
I have not yet gotten accustomed to the stillness of suburbs despite being here for years now. (Side note: In NYC you can also get stillness and quiet, usually by going upwards into skyscrapers)
I am getting anxious just thinking about this. With all those sky scrappers..
But seriously, I hope everything is fine.
I'm aware that Atlantic and mid-American quakes are felt over a much wider area than Left-coast temblors, because of the more-intact, less-fractured, largely limestone and granitic foundation bedrock (as opposed to a largely fractured sedimentary basement along the Pacific seaboard). But is the actual shaking intensity greater? AFAIU that's mostly affected by factors such as ground liquifaction, total ground water, and the like, which tend to be fairly strongly localised in effect. E.g., you can find seismic hazard maps of the SF Bay Area which show high-risk regions, largely on fill, reclaimed marsh, and sand dunes (e.g., the Marina, Financial District, SOMA, Sunset and Richmond districts of San Francisco), as opposed to bedrock (Twin Peaks, Potrero Hill). The former all amplify ground movement, the latter tend to shake far less.
River bottom land and estuaries on the East Coast would similarly show higher seismic motion, but I'm not sure this carries over for the region as a whole.
Equivalent in lateral motion/shakiness to a California 6.0 due to the shallow depth of the 4.8
Most local magnitude scales are
>>> determined from the logarithm of the amplitude of waves recorded by seismographs. Adjustments are included to compensate for the variation in the distance between the various seismographs and the epicenter of the earthquake[1].
So unless people in the East have seismographs located farther underground with scientists staffing them really deep underground -for reasons beyond me- "Shallow depth" is irrelevant.
Also, there's no such thing as a "feels like X magnitude" earthquake [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_scale
[2] https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/22348/what-...
>"Feels like" is measured on seismic intensity scales such as the Mercalli scale. These measure the peak acceleration or velocity at a given point, or the damage done by the earthquake. Intensity is influenced by many things, such as the depth of the earthquake, the distance to the ruptured section of the fault, and the local surface material.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Mercalli_intensity_sc...
NYC has had 5.x earthquakes that have caused e.g. chimneys to collapse, something unheard of in california.
The parent posted decimals.
As you said, they are not the same thing.
Depth IS relevant to how an earthquake feels (as opposed to your assertion it isn't)--even the usgs publishes depth information. If you go back to the stack overflow link you posted, you can clearly see that a lower magnitude earthquake can be much more damaging.
The point is, richter measurement doesn't tell the whole story, and yes, you could say that a 4.8 would feel like a 6.0, even if we don't have a good way beyond the mercalli scale of discussing that. That's because the original output energy is only partially relevant to how someone experiences a seismic event.
tl;dr: your pedantic assertion that there's no conversion between the two is correct. your assertion that depth doesn't matter for feeling quakes is incorrect.