Cathryn,

Your ear tone of 32 seconds presents and interesting case study because hearing tones at that length for most people is rare. I haven't had much experience with it having had one one extremely long ear tone which resulted in a quake >7.

What our viewers don't know is that your ear tone direction is opposite of the most in that your left ear picks up locations south and east and your right ear is for north and west. Thus we would expect an earthquake 1180 miles south/south east/east of your location.

The only way to determine some possible epicenter locations would be to use the link we normally do for straight line distance, entering your coordinates and those which might possibly match from South America, to develop a circular line from the west coast across to the east coast. Visually if you would imagine a "bulls eye" and you sit in the center and this earthquake would arrive in the far reaches of the outer bands.

The interesting thing about this distance when viewed from a circle is that there are places inside the US which are east of you which could be 1180 miles away, but our minds usually take us on a southward trend instead of due east. This probably happens because there are more large earthquakes in South America than there are on the New Madrid fault.

Overall, one has to appreciate that if a person is actually hearing an ear tone for an earthquake at that distance it cannot be a small earthquake, because no one can hear that sound for a small earthquake that far away. I frequently have ear tones of 13 seconds which are for quakes in northern Baja, but none of the matching quakes are ever less than 3.5 as an example.

Of course I would love to see this method work perfectly for your ear tone, but I also know that when counting seconds for that long it is not uncommon to be off up to 3 seconds, but normally, not more than that. That gives you about 120 miles of grace. But hey, we don't need any fancy computer programs to do the math for this one, only the distance calculator.

Petra