As women across the globe today bared their breasts in defiance of Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi’s claim that cleavage caused earthquakes, the earth shook in Taiwan.
A tremor, measuring 6.5 on the richter scale, came as a Facebook event called ‘Boobquake’ received support from 200,000 women vowing to bare their chests.
But the organiser, Jennifer McCreight, a student at Purdue University, Indiana, today insisted the Taiwan quake does not count because it happened outside her time zone.
She admitted on her blog that the wobble was significant, but not unusual.
‘On avg, 134 magnitude 6-6.9 earthquakes occur annually,’ she wrote on her Twitter feed, before following it up on her blog with: ‘If we get many of a similar magnitude in the next 24 hours, we might start worshipping the power of immodesty.’ Luckily, although the earthquake, which hit the southeast coast of Taiwan today, was powerful, it caused relatively little damage.
Buildings, which are designed to withstand regular quakes, swayed briefly but none fell and there were no casualties. The tremblor was felt at the site of an earlier landslide in northern Taiwan, which led to a motorway bridge to collapse, but did not hamper rescue efforts.
The 6.5-magnitude quake hit at 10:59 a.m. (0259 GMT), 195 miles off the southern Taiwan city of Taitung at a depth of 6.2 miles, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
The agency's initial report had put the quake's magnitude at 6.9.
In Taipei, buildings swayed for up to 20 seconds when the quake hit, but police said there were no reports of casualties or damage anywhere on the island.
