Awesome--literally. Thanks, wow (and Helen). I had thought, since becoming friends with Bingley, that if you could somehow put a long rod through the earth starting here, it would come out somewhere in Indonesia. Our newspaper this morning said that it took 16 minutes for the seismographs in New Madrid, Kentucky, to register the activity that started the tsunamis. Sixteen minutes to get straight through the earth.
"All of our weak-motion stations picked it up, from Grayson, up near Carter Caves, down to Ballard County and Hickman County," said University of Kentucky geophysicist Edward Woolery. "We're pretty much on the opposite side of the globe, so it was pretty much a straight shot through from directly below. It's amazing, and on the seismogram you can see that it goes on for about half an hour ... where just the whole Earth is ringing like a bell."
http://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/2005/01/02ky/B1-byron0102-5551.html