Yet the worst of three earth quakes was in new Madrid, what is now Missouri. None of the cities near by now has earthquake standards. A repeat would far surpass any quake our country has ever had, affecting an area ten times the area affected by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
The Great Midwest Earthquake of 1811
Two hundred years ago, a series of powerful temblors devastated what is now Missouri. Could it happen again?
---------------------snip------------------------
At 2:15 a.m. on December 16, 1811, residents of the frontier town of New Madrid, in what is now Missouri, were jolted from their beds by a violent earthquake. The ground heaved and pitched, hurling furniture, snapping trees and destroying barns and homesteads. The shaking rang church bells in Charleston, South Carolina, and toppled chimneys as far as Cincinnati, Ohio.
--------------------snip--------------------------
As people were starting to rebuild that winter, two more major quakes struck, on January 23 and February 7. Each New Madrid earthquake had a magnitude of 7.5 or greater, making them three of the most powerful in the continental United States and shaking an area ten times larger than that affected by the magnitude 7.8 San Francisco earthquake of 1906.
---------------------snip---------------------
Magnani’s most startling discovery came south of the seismic zone: two faults, one near Memphis, both active in the past 10,000 years. Other researchers have recently identified faults near Commerce, Missouri, and other places outside the New Madrid Seismic Zone that have been active in the past few thousand to millions of years, suggesting that the middle of the country is less stable than it seems.
Geologists have long blamed the New Madrid earthquakes on the Reelfoot Rift, a 500-million-year-old area of weakness in the crust. But the newfound faults lie outside the rift. “Maybe the reason we haven’t been able to solve the mystery of the New Madrid earthquakes is that we’ve been too focused on New Madrid,” Magnani says. “Maybe earthquake activity moves around systematically over time.”
-------------------snip------------------------
So we could something rather horrible in the future.