In another of our continued observations of “the world is getting smaller by the moment” … people here have been extremely interested in the enormous earthquake in Japan and the tsunami that followed.

Even Al Jazeera Arabic’s news network broke away its 24/7 coverage of unrest in the region to do hours and hours on the disasters in Japan.

Earthquakes are almost unknown in the Arabian Peninsula. It’s a region with very little tectonic activity, and when we feel a tremor, in the UAE, it nearly always is the final ripples of one with an epicenter hundreds of miles away, in Iran or Pakistan.

But a disaster like this one, anywhere in the world, gets worldwide attention now.

What struck me about Japan, as a native of South California:

–The size of the quake. Whether it’s an 8.8, 8.9 or 9.0 on the Richter scale, whatever it is … it’s absolutely enormous. We have earthquakes in Southern California, lots of them, but nothing like an 8.9. Nothing. Check this history of California quakes, and you will not see a single 8-point-anything quake. None. A few 7s, but that’s as high as we go. Not that the plates around California aren’t capable of popping an 8-magnitude quake, but they have not for the last 350 years. So California quake veterans shouldn’t get too cocky with the “I’ve been through plenty of quakes” thing. None of us has been through a quake like the one that just hit Japan.

–The length of the quake. When we in California endure an earthquake, we are almost always describe it as lasting far longer than it actually did. A five-second quake feels like 10 seconds. Or 20. In Japan, the quake lasted 30 seconds. T-h-i-r-t-y. If that happened to us, we would describe it as having lasted at least a minute and probably two.

–The aftershocks. The last story I saw suggested that Japan has been hit by more than 30 aftershocks that registered magnitude 6.0 or higher. Again, consult the list linked above, and you will see very few above 6.0 hitting California, and some of those caused fairly significant damage. If we weren’t freaked out by the first, massive quake (and we would have been), the 30 aftershocks of 6.0 or better would have left us sleeping in tents on the street.

–I’m glad I don’t own stock in companies that build nuclear power plants. Japan’s struggle to keep several reactors from meltdowns (in the physics sense of the word, not in the “he had a tantrum” sense) has to be a big warning flag to any region in the world with even occasional tectonic activity. Like Southern California. If I lived next door to San Onofre, which is about as old as some of the Japanese plants just this side of meltdowns, I would be nervous. I also would be nervous about building any new ones (and the UAE wants to build about seven, with the first due to open in 2016), because no matter how many safety features you build in, we are seeing that a big enough jolt will compromise the integrity of any reactor anywhere.

So, yes, we continue to monitor the situation in Japan. It has driven Libya and Oman and Bahrain off the cover of our newspaper. It is that big.