I felt the whole world tremble today. I’m adding it to my list of unlikely experiences.

Today I felt the whole world tremble.

I never thought I would experience an earthquake. I know for many people it is something that is viewed as the cost of doing business, but I live in Toronto, which doesn’t see a lot of seismic activity. What little we do get –the ‘pop back’ from the ground rising up after being depressed by glaciers that disappeared ten thousand years ago– only occurs once every decade or two, and it generally goes unnoticed except by the sensitive equipment of scientists who monitor such things. That wasn’t the case today, though. For fifteen or twenty seconds, everything noticeably trembled.

( map from the CBC )

The 5.0-magnitude earthquake’s epicentre was hundreds of kilometers away, and nineteen kilometers under ground, but I felt it as a distinct and unsettling vibration, a tremor that I first mistook for some piece of heavy machinery at one of the three different condo building sites that surrounds my office just north of Bay and Bloor. It didn’t make sense, though: No truck could sustain that kind of building-wide vibration. I rose from my desk and made eye contact with the woman across the way from me.

“Did you feel that?” She asked.

“Yes,” I said, elaborating on my theory. Someone else on the floor said it was an earthquake, but I didn’t believe that was possible. Not in Toronto. Not for that long. Not that noticable. No way.

People started walking from window to window, checking to see if there was unusual activity at one of the building sites around us, but nothing explained it. My stomach continued to tremble long after my feet told me the vibrations were gone. The thought that the world could be made to shake –the power that it takes to shake the whole world– just seemed so unlikely, so beyond my ken.

I jumped onto my computer, and within two minutes, the Globe & Mail had a bulletin up on their website: It was definitely an earthquake. It had been stronger in Ottawa, and the paper’s newsroom there had been evacuated. Information flowed in via twitter: People had felt it in Montreal, in Windsor, in Ohio. What a thought! I could lay my palm flat on a map of North America, and everything under my palm had been vibrating just moments ago.

One of my co-workers muttered, “I can’t die here…” then at length she returned to work.

I sat at my desk for a long time, consciously aware of my heart beating, trying to wrap my head around what had just happened. I admit, I got very little done over the next couple of hours.

It’s something new to add to my list of strange, unique experiences, and I spent the rest of the day, on and off, quietly contemplating some of the other unlikely events I have witnessed in my life.