All Shook Up

I've got this guilty pleasure of watching the apocalyptic disaster shows on television because I'm secretly fascinated by carnage and destruction. Not that I would ever actually want to experience anything like that, but I find it incredibly interesting, against my better judgement. So, this afternoon as I was sitting down to a lunch of homemade homesick quesadillas, I was flipping through the channels on the TV and noticed that "Mega Disasters" was on the History Channel.

Past experience has taught me that I should never, ever, under any circumstance allow myself to watch that show or any shows like it...but being the self-rebel that I am, I ignored my smarter self and watched 3 straight episodes. The first was about a magma pocket under Yellowstone. The second was about a tsunami in the Mediterranean. The third was, you guessed it, about Memphis. Well, sort of.

Prior to watching this episode of scary-show, I had always just assumed that the worst earthquake in US history was the San Francisco earthquake of the early 1900's....just because that is the one I have always been most familiar with and have seen the documentaries and photographs. Surprise to me that the actual strongest earthquake in US history was the New Madrid, Missouri earthquake of 1812.

New Madrid sits on a small fault line running right up the Mississippi River area, caused from the shoving together of the major tectonic plates on either coast causing stress in the middle of the continent. See the red spot in the map below, compliments of Wikipedia.

This earthquake, the largest of a series of earthquakes starting in 1811, was completely terrifying to the people living in New Madrid. It registered somewhere between a 7.5 and 8.0 in magnitude, destroyed houses, shot pockets of sand and steam out of the ground, and even caused the Mississippi River to flow backwards. To the then-people of New Madrid, the earthquake seemed like the end of the world. It caused sidewalk damage in Washington D.C., caused church bells to ring in Toronto, and was felt for up to 1 million square miles. It was a terrible, terrible earthquake that was only NOT cataclysmic because the Midwest wasn't very developed yet.

If you hop on Google Maps, Memphis is actually the closest "big city" to New Madrid....only about 50 miles away. The "Mega Disasters" people were insisting that should an earthquake of 6.5 or higher strike the area, we will pretty much all die. To be more specific, they said that new steel buildings would probably be ok, that wooden residences would probably be ok, and that masonry buildings would crash to the ground from the shaking. All of the bridges will collapse (even the I-40 one they're working on if the magnitude is over 7.6), the gas lines will blow, fires will start, then there will be firestorms from that. Additionally, everything will flood and we will all die, even though all of the buildings might not fall down. Not only this, but aftershocks in the 1812 earthquake lasted for about 5 months. This would make it really difficult to make any kind of relief effort.

Now, I don't know how much I actually have to WORRY about that kind of earthquake situation. All of the "Mega Disasters" shows end by making people feel that they're going to die at any second. They say that according to the geological record, earthquakes with the magnitude of the 1812 New Madrid earthquake happen every 300-500 years. Since it's only been about 200, I don't think there's too terribly much to be concerned with.

But now the idea has been planted in my head that I live in a big, scary earthquake place and I will inevitably be fighting off nightmares for years to come. But, at the same time, I'm kind of excited. I've left Tornado Alley and the Dust Bowl and put myself in the way of a whole new kind of natural disaster. This should be interesting!

Until next time!