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New Madrid Earthquake Research Paper

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The tea cups that began to shatter were enough to wake Rose M. Quinn from her bed in the early morning hours of April 18, 1906. The earthquake that lasted just one minute was estimated to be close to 8.0 on the richter scale and was large enough to destroy 30,000 buildings, including her own home, in what was determined to be one of the most catastrophic natural disasters in U.S history. And while Ms.Quinn held out hope that her “City of the Golden West” would restore its nearly 400 million dollars worth of damage (10.8 billion dollars today), an even stronger and largely unknown earthquake rocked the United States just 100 years prior.

Pure darkness settled in New Madrid, Missouri on the 7th of February, 1812 as the atmosphere was completely …show more content…

The New Madrid Seismic Zone has remained relatively quiet in the last 2000 years, with the largest earthquake only being rated a 6.3 on the richter scale, occurring in 1895. Since 1974, seismometers have been utilized to capture earthquakes that are too small to notice, known as microearthquakes. These microearthquakes have been recorded in numbers greater than 4,000 since 1975. These shocks were first thought to be aftershocks of the earthquakes that occurred 165 years ago, but with the exponential amount of recurrence, there is something rumbling deep in the earth's crust. Clearly, the New Madrid Seismic Zone is anything but quiet. The candid truth is it is not a matter of if , but when. The Seismic Zone is long overdue for an earthquake. Susan Hough, a seismologist of the United States Geological Survey told NPR ,that “Even though we can't predict earthquakes, we can predict the rates of aftershocks over time. The frequency of aftershocks - smaller quakes that follow the big earthquake - decreases with time, known in seismology as Omori's Law. And in the New Madrid Seismic Zone, the aftershocks aren't following Omori's Law." So will America experience another 1811 quake? Although time will tell, we better

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