[Blogger]

New Madrid?

[missnry]

New Madrid?

Nope. These are towards central Arkansas. These are in Bill Clinton's neighborhood around Hot Springs. Gives people something else to worry about besides the election results.

[Bon mots]

The biggest earthquake in US history actually happened there - but at a time when few people actually inhabited the area in 1811 or 1812.

The New Madrid Earthquake is one of the largest succession of earthquakes, including the most intensive ever indirectly inferred (not recorded) in the contiguous United States, beginning with an initial pair of very large earthquakes on December 16th, 1811, plus aftershocks and other large related quakes separated by a succession of smaller aftershock quakes with the largest event classified as a Mega-quake of greater than 8.0 on the Richter scale occurring on February 7, 1812. It got its name from its primary location in the New Madrid Seismic Zone, near New Madrid, Louisiana Territory (now Missouri), where a stretch of land five miles deep spanning from Arkansas to Illinois shifted and slipped. The fault is believed to generate a slip every 250-400 years.[1]

This earthquake was preceded by three other major quakes: two on December 16, 1811, and one on January 23, 1812. These earthquakes destroyed approximately half the town of New Madrid. There were also numerous aftershocks in the area for the rest of that winter with research indicating a series of some 2,000 earthquakes overall that affected the lands of what would become eight of today’s heartland states of the United States.[1]

There are estimates that the earthquakes were felt strongly over roughly 130,000 square kilometers (50,000 square miles), and moderately across nearly 3 million square kilometers (1 million square miles). The historic 1906 San Francisco earthquake, by comparison, was felt moderately over roughly 16,000 square kilometers (6,000 square miles).

[PAR35]

New Madrid?

Natural gas drilling?

[TomGuy]

New Madrid?

Many of those names are pronounced somewhat differently in MO.

That is pronounced New MADdrid in Missouri, not New MahDrid.

The New Madrid fault is the location of significant earthquakes, 1811-1812.

[Robert A Cook PE]

There has been a long-running series of very small quakes down a line starting up in the St Lawrence River crack (er, fault line) in Canada down through the Great Lakes (Niagra Falls IS where the river “falls” over a fault line ya know) then down towards and through New Madrid, then it seems to split: one branch out towards the central OK and Dallas area - where a few quakes were located a few weeks ago, and the other going down a little more directly to the south.

The area is in the middle of the original very, very old center-of-continent blocks from the original splits and joins of Africa and east-US blocks, but (other than South Carolina's Charleston quake) only the new Madrid ones in 1803 have been large.

Still, you only need two or three “large ones” in 200 years to cause a problem.