Five years ago today, this region experienced a historic event: The Great East Coast Earthquake.

With a magnitude of 5.8 and an epicenter in Mineral, Va. (less than 100 miles from VMI), the quake was felt across 12 states (and into Canada). See below for a few interesting facts and articles about the earthquake, as well as some books and e-books we have on earthquake-related topics:

• More people felt this earthquake than any other in U.S. history (Horton 2012).
• Researchers examining a random sample of Twitter feeds found that the first tweet about the earthquake occurred 54 seconds after it hit (Crooks et al. 2013).
• Dolphins at the National Aquarium in Baltimore exhibited unusual behavior up to 60 seconds before the earthquake was felt by their trainers (Turner et al. 2014).

_{Horton, J.W. 2012. “The 2011 Virginia Earthquake: what are scientists learning (PDF).” EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union 93(33):317-324.
Crooks, A., A. Croitoru, A. Stefanidis, and J. Radzikowski. 2013. “#Earthquake: Twitter as a distributed sensor system (PDF).” Transactions in GIS 17(1):124-147.
Turner, M.R., C. Turner, S. Hunter, and M. Day. 2014. “Observed reactions of Atlantic bottlenose dolphins at the National Aquarium during the 2011 Virginia earthquake.” Marine Mammal Science 31(2):726-733.}