[quote=@KriticalKrab]
What exactly are small scale effects, and how long would something like an earthquake need to activate?
[/quote]
Small scale to the point of being near-instantaneous are things like raising walls of rock to defend himself, causing pillars to erupt out of the ground, creating narrow fissures to trip people up, and other localized effects. 
Large-scale tectonic activity depends on magnitude of the event, with a 4.0 (just enough shaking to be noticeable, very low chance of structural damage) taking... let's say ~10 minutes, assuming Jump City isn't on a geologic fault. From there, the time needed doubles at each interval (5.0 is 20 minutes, 6.0 is 40, 7.0 is 80, and so on).