The struggle to understand why earthquakes happen in America's heartland
undark.org
undark.org
Essentially, the ice age's massive glaciers deformed the ground, and it is slowly rebounding over 1000s of years. The result is minor tremors, sometimes larger quakes.
I am in southern Quebec, and there is a LOT of water here. Personally, I suspect there are glaciers underground which are still thawing, which would also cause additional land movement.
Some supporting thoughts...
* one year, after a lot of snow (record snowfall, where some people's 1st story windows were covered entirely), it took until July for all the snow to melt. This was in areas around my house, and in my forest, where sun didn't shine.
* if you look into how we used to store ice for the summer, we'd cut it out of lakes in massive blocks (eg, Lake Ontario or some such), and then store it in warehouses covered with sawdust. Such ice was even used residentially, delivered every once in a while, and used in a refrigerator like 'ice box'. This ice would last the whole summer, it takes time for that much mass to melt, especially with some insulation.
Which is what underground glaciers have... they're insulated.
Even a decade ago, we'd see -40C regularly here in Jan and Feb, which would counter 40C in the summer I suspect.
Anyhow, this could all be simple post-ice age land reformation.
A rule of thumb is that only the first two meters of ground responds appreciably to annual variability, which also means that only the very near surface temperatures have the possibility of affecting snowmelt. Thus, any remaining deep permafrost would have almost no effect. It's too much of an insulating overcoat to allow for meaningful heat flux on those timescales.
I live on the other side of the state from New Madrid and can tell you, there's a 0% chance the Missouri state legislature passes a bill requiring earthquake proofing of buildings. You'd have an unending stream of people from outstate explaining how their little country town just can't afford to meet such codes, that it's government overreach, that the next quake could be hundreds of years from now... it'd never end. They're far, far more likely to pass a law saying cities like Kansas City and St. Louis can't force seismic-aware building codes on citizens.
But the people are also not entirely wrong: it's dreadfully poor, so adding extra cost to buildings for something that might happen in the next 50 years is a tough sell.
I think people safe and sound and wealthy in California aren't really familiar with the perspective I saw there. It's like, what's the worst that can happen? You die? Tragedy and death are kind of expected and built in. People are generally very religious, a good number of people are in the military or at least have absorbed the idea that it's valorous to die for an ideal, and besides that are poor and don't really have health insurance and are accustomed to the the lingering idea of dying somewhat young.
Before we even talk about building code for earthquakes, let's remember that a whole bunch of people are living in trailers or double-wides in a relatively active tornado zone! One of my wife's colleagues died in a tornado while we were there and it was scary and horrible. And there are no basements because the water table is so high, so even moderately sturdier construction like our apartment is still honestly a little dicey. Several times my wife and I were huddled in our bathroom wearing bicycle helmets and a mattress draped over us with the tornado sirens sounding.
Nature is scary and ultimately it feels like there's just limits to what poor Southeastern Missouri can afford to do about it.
1) telling the two cities that are most of the state’s economy that they can’t have nice things, and
2) reversing successful ballot initiatives when the voters try to have nice things.
When this is the case I wonder if the level of governance selected is too high, and people could achieve their end goal with more local action.
Never been near New Madrid, Missouri. But given its "per capita income...was $22,046" in 2020 and "about 14.80% of families and 21.0% of the population were below the poverty line" [1], I wouldn't be surprised if you put the town in a room, explained the risks, and put forward 0% financing for earthquake proofing, most would reject the offer.
The money it would take to earthquake-proof New Madrid is almost certainly better spent on healthcare and education.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid,_Missouri#Demograph...
EDIT Reader heads experiencing flyover - read: "The struggle to understand why sunrises happen in America's heartland"
Was going to point out that this is in Missouri, but it turns out Missouri is smack in the middle of the pack when it comes to educational attainment [1]. T
he states and territories with the lowest rate of high-school diplomas are Puerto Rico, California, Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana. (Bachelor's: W. Virginia, Mississippi, Arkansas. Advanced: Puerto Rico, Mississippi, Arkansas.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
Either schools in CA are harder as in teaching much more, CA is counting more kids, CA is failing kids who didn't academically succeed, or MO might not be tracking kids from certain areas, MO might be pushing kids along and passing them out when they don't know the material. It could be as simple as when schools lose track of a kid CA might default to "did not graduate" and MO defaults to "don't care not tracking".
Live in each place for a week and tell me the average education level in the lower midwest is on par. I know that one person isn't a statistical sample, but it is so easy to reproduce and so many people have done it seeing the same results.
Texas and California have the highest "percentage of public school students who were English learners (ELs)" of any state or jurisdiction [1].
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cgf/english-learn...
A lot of writers have the self-awareness to know this, but delude themselves that they're able to act outside that system.
However, find yourself an LA writer who's never visited anywhere not called "the $FOO core metro area," and let them tell you how they think the world works. It's like staring into the abyss.
I live in Nebraska. We are fucking stupid.
Old folk there claim they use that metaphor because that's not metaphorical, but actual what happened in 1811/12.
The Arkansas side is flatter, but possibly because that's mostly in the Mississippi River's ambit (until you reach Crowley's Ridge. The article shows a picture of the mirror structure on the east side of the Mississippi called Chickasaw Bluffs which is very close to the current course of the river)
What more do you want people to do? Seattle has had large earthquakes in its short history as a large American city and honestly even mid 20th century construction held up ok.
This isn't like parts of Japan where large earthquakes will happen on regular intervals. Engineers have to weigh costs vs risks.
"In Tennessee, jurisdictions can decide whether to opt in to building codes with earthquake provisions, while other states — like Missouri — don’t have state-wide building codes at all, though there are efforts to change that."
Attempts to entirely de-risk life are a futile effort, and reasonable people can disagree on what level of safety is appropriate.
Except nuclear reactor backup systems </tongue in cheek>
It wouldn't make sense for every place to prepare as much as Japan for things that are less likely there than in Japan. Does Japan have as many tornado shelters as Kansas? Probably not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tornadoes_and_tornado_...
I grew up on the edges of the New Madrid fault area and, while earthquakes were never discussed, we did tornado drills about every two months while in school. After I entered the workforce, that got closer to once a year, but you were still expected to have a plan and supplies. It was basic emergency preparedness, like any sensible person. Granted, big F5 tornados are rare, but small ones were common enough to not even be noteworthy.
Having left that region as an adult, it was a small culture shock meeting people who never had this kind of training. After all, the places I've visited all experience tornados, though not as often as my old home town. Still, the usual attitude I encounter is "I've never seen a tornado - they don't happen here". It's true that tornados don't happen often, just like my birthplace hasn't seen a serious earthquake in my lifetime, but they do happen.
I guess that's why I'm curious about your experiences. I've never been to Japan and I've read enviable reports of your disaster preparedness, but I honestly have no idea how your schools and culture handle tornados.
That said, it is very common and normal for people to keep emergency backpacks that they can grab and take to shelters if there's an evacuation. I have one in the closet next to my front door. The government also periodically gives out free emergency supplies for people to keep. There's publicized evacuation plans and routes, and places seem like they're prepared for big storms: subway stations for instance have huge doors at the entrances to protect against flooding.
All of these problems are known, but not funded, because who cares? Disaster management nerds? e.g the 2022 cascadia emergency exercise: https://mil.wa.gov/asset/6390e374e0f21
Anyway, the reason this stuff doesn't get enough funding is because the process of sorting out public spending priorities is called politics. Everybody has their own idea about what needs money and how much money should be thrown around. There's no objectively correct way to sort it all out, no means by which we can weigh the relative merits of increased library funding against retrofitting single family homes against earthquakes except by asking people which they prefer. And different people have different tolerance for risk, somebody who decided to tolerate the risk of a major earthquake sometime in the next X years because they'd rather fund some other project isn't necessarily wrong. It's not a matter of simply educating people about the risk (and FWIW, the average person in Seattle is definitely aware that the region is geologically risky.)
Not just that, but also to rethink how we reinforce them in major waterways or even minor but navigable waterways, if any heavy enough boat can just crash into a support column and take the whole thing down... albeit accidentally in that case.
Most modern bridges do take into account the possibility that there will be collisions. But it is also very hard to protect against a collision with an object that weighs 100k tons or more. By the time the boat is crashing into the bridge it’s too late. The solution is to design better systems around preventing things from getting to that point.
A good analogy is airport security. We are very bad at keeping weapons off planes. The TSA routinely fails to find knives and guns. The reason we haven’t had any more 9/11s isn’t because we made buildings airplane proof or because TSA doesn’t let box cutters through (they absolutely do). It’s because we learned to pre-empt coordinated well organized attacks using intelligence, and we hardened physical security at the cockpit door (I’m guessing mostly the latter).
You're forgetting the REAL reason airplanes are basically not hijacked anymore: Flight 93.
It used to be, if you threatened to blow up an airplane, the passengers would largely choose not to confront them, because the SOP of hijacking was to land somewhere and negotiate. Indeed this desire to not rock the boat actually turned one hijacking by drunk teens into a catastrophe when the hijackers were too stupid to understand that a plane couldn't just fly to Australia without picking up more fuel, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961.
9/11 changed that risk calculus for passengers. Now everybody knows what hijackers COULD do, and are willing to endure some danger to prevent that, to the point we've kind of overcorrected and people are yelling at and harassing fellow passengers for non-issues.
People who don't have much of it (which is to say, most of the area in the New Madrid seismic zone) don't want to spend it on something that might happen at some completely unpredictable time in the future. They don't want the government telling them to do it, either, because in their minds, that's the government telling them to spend money they don't have.
More money == more interest in long-term preservation.
"Communism" and "Socialism" are invoked like magical bogeyman that will destroy everything. To have any discussion on social welfare this needs to be somehow bypassed in discussions.
But yeah, even there they want to ignore their interdependence on society.
> The economy isn't a zero sum game and WELL THOUGHT OUT infrastructure projects generally pay for themselves in the long run many times over. I think we are too interested in today's budget to pay attention to historically valuable things.
Consider the megaports in China's Belt and Road Initiative that will never turn a profit. Consider Neom Line, which is unlikely to ever be worth the cost. Consider. Consider the Tacoma Narrows bridge, which needed to be rebuilt because it collapsed months after construction.
Infrastructure that many people need and demand in situ often produce far more wealth than free market alternatives when executed with a base level of competence.
Chinese Megaports served no economic demand and are functionally modern day land grabs. Neom is zany and funded by literal royalty with no real plan. The Tecoma Narrows did insufficient testing and learned a base engineering principle.
Two these failures were people on the outside pushing an idea the inside didn't want and the third failed because people doing the work didn't know something critical.
Earthquake proofing the midwest is likely to be both of these failures. The people here don't want it. We wouldn't know how to do it even if we did because why the earthquakes happen in the Midwest is an open scientific question. Knowing why could well change the remediation that plate tectonic induced earthquakes and presuming it doesn't we without testing and certification we don't even know how to reliably hire earthquake proofing engineers.
None of that is to say that it is impossible to do something like earthquake proof Omaha, but being possible doesn't make it a good idea. Omaha doesn't seem to want it. If it is forced on Omaha will they hire good engineers or will they hire the lowest bidder that just pencil whips everything? If they do hire good engineers will that matter if these midwest earthquakes are fundamentally different in some unknown way from CA quakes? If the remediation the good engineers implement do work then do they actually save lives and money? If there are no earthquakes, which is possible, then of course they won't. What if a 5.0 quake hits Omaha with and with and without the remediation what really is the impact?
If I could spend money on laws and engineers that might have a hypothetical payoff sometime in the next 50 years and it might save tens of lives I would be a fool if I didn't do something about education, tornadoes, train derailments, or flooding with that same money that would almost certainly save lives next year.
This is, of course, correct.
> In the long run requiring stronger buildings probably won't hurt the economy and likely will actually help it.
This is likely wrong, largely depending on details. But first, building don't have hit points, they have structure. Earthquake dampers don't help with anything else these buildings experience, and a lot of other earthproofing doesn't help most situations. Raising the cost of something when not needed is literally wasting money. If it has no impact then how will it help the economy? Most buildings don't last the requisite 500 years to see a single earthquake.
It isn't like the New Madrid region of MO has skyscrapers. Look at the picture on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid,_Missouri
That is 3,000 people on a busy day! Telling them to earthquake proof means potholes don't get filled. What does buildings that cost 50% more get them? It won't help with floods, fires, or tornadoes, things they likely actually see every year.
Even in a larger place, like an actual city like Omaha or St Louis the amount of tall buildings is limited and those falling would risk thousands of lives. A targeted piece of legislation mandating some kind of check/restriction/requirement on buildings over 5 stories would cover a hypothetical risk for nearly all risk cases.
> Stronger infrastructure lasts longer and encourages
Does it? I live in Omaha. There is no man-made structure that can withstand a big enough tornado.
The First National tower, the 47 story skyscraper we have, could collapse any day if tornado decides it happens. It resides at roughly 20th and Dodge street (every 12 streets is a mile) and we had real tornado destroy a neighborhood at roughly 180th and dodge. That was 3 months and a day ago. That same storm put a tornado down on the Eppley Airfield's flight line (Omaha's tiny airport north of 10th and dodge). That one storm put tornadoes on either side of the First National Tower. If the F3 that hit that neighborhood hit downtown the FNB Tower would have gone down no matter how many elastic earthquake dampers were installed because a building doesn't have more or less HP like a video game, it has structural integrity to resist shearing, tensile, compressive, and elastic loads. There is no building above the ground that survives 200+ mph wind smashing the remnants of nearby houses into it.
Source for tornado: https://www.wowt.com/2024/04/27/live-updates-tornado-survivo...
That building could have collapsed and engineering something that tall to withstand tornadoes is simply something humanity hasn't figured out yet. Why bother with stronger against shakes that never happen when everything gets rebuilt for tornadoes on a long enough time frame? Just leaving that earthquake damping money in an interest bearing tornado recovery fund would save more lives and do more good.
> My point about the economy not being zero sum is that we can prepare and prosper, they aren't mutually exclusive.
The economy isn't a zero sum game, but that doesn't mean it is a good idea to simply destroy resources. And money we have on hand now is literally a zero game.
New Madrid could spend money on hiring a few teachers or "New Infrastructure" and see much larger gains for their economy because in 18 years their workforce would be better educated and likely save a few lives. In that same time earthquake-proof construction would do nothing. Even if they did have the money, no one has infinite money so wasting it is bad. Consider Omaha, earthquake proofing costs something like double or triple the construction cost for many kinds of structures and for most people will and fundamentally can never provide them a benefit.
Let's flip this around. How much money does your town spend on preparation for giant asteroid collisions? Probably none. Because it doesn't happen there and if it did you wouldn't be ready no matter how much you spent. Phoenix doesn't waste money on snow plows, and if it did snow the city needs to shut down anyway. Salt Lake City doesn't prepare for hurricanes, and if it had one the city would need to shut down anyway. Why prepare for things that are so unlikely you don't even know how to prepare for them? If these were city ending events that literally erased all life, then maybe, but think about how much else needs to change for any of these scenarios. These would all be either nothing-burgers or national disasters one city couldn't hope to prepare for.
Money spent on any of those is completely wasted and could have gone to filling potholes that all of have because I have seen them all first hand. Phoenix has the fewest but the scariest, those heat induced fumaroles are gnarly. Filling potholes immediately returns on investments because roads are infrastructure that actually gets used.
> The economy isn't a zero sum game, but that doesn't mean it is a good idea to simply destroy resources. And money we have on hand now is literally a zero game.
This gets to the core of the 'not a zero sum game' and 'how do we get people to take it seriously' argument. As I have argued, twice now, it likely isn't throwing money away and could create real economic value, especially if the focus is on critical infrastructure, infrastructure that gets heavy daily use anyway. The fact that it isn't a zero sum game means you can do this and still fill potholes. In fact, it means you likely could do this and slip in filling potholes under the guise of 'ensuring access to critical infrastructure'. In the end this is only a zero sum game when we make it one artificially by finding reasons to avoid doing things that give us value like improving infrastructure and disaster preparedness.
I am not taking it seriously because I feel you are presenting platitudes and deepities instead of serious arguments.
"Not a zero sum game" is often used interchangeably with "society doesn't need to care about costs", and I feel that is what you are doing here. And I strongly value infrastructure and generally support things that are considered "wealth redistribution schemes".
Convince me spending on earthquake-proofing will have ANY value and you can begin changing my mind. Convince me spending earthquake-proofing is better than tornado resilience and you will have completely changed my mind. Tornadoes actually kill people every year in the regions we are talking and those funds are already tight.
I simply think there are better ways to save lives and money than earthquake-proofing in regions that get earthquakes approximately as often Phoenix gets snow.
What risks should a human in the 21st century take seriously? Like, if there is a 1-in-50,000 chance of death or lasting injury, is that something that should have me hiding in the closet? I'd take a 1-in-100 chance very seriously of course, I run into 1-in-100 events many times in any given year. If I am supposed to take a particular risk seriously, how much am I expected to pay to mitigate it?
You're slandering their ability to be rational without even taking into the account that they have evaluated it and judged the probability too low to act on without bothering to check if they quantify that correctly. They don't have the wrong numbers, they just set the threshold higher than you do.
For me personally, anything below about 1-in-5000 warrants very minor attention, anything in the 1-in-100,000 area isn't even worth thinking about. Covid was scary as shit, early on in some regions it seemed to rise above 1-in-2000 chance of death.
With the above in mind, my comment basically can be summed up as 'It is easier to see the issues in the PNW and the PNW isn't doing what is needed to avoid them so how can we expect better preparation elsewhere?'. Pointing out issues in the PNW is like shooting fish in a barrel. Everyone in Ocean Shores is going to die and that is the tip of the iceberg. Estimates vary but a 1 in 4 chance in the next 50 years of a cascadia event is not a ridiculous estimate. With the preparation in place it is not unlikely that tens of thousands will die in the first few hours, if not even worse than that. The emergency response won't be able to help because the region impacted is massive and the first responders will be part of that region so even they will need to be rescued. The scale of this dwarfs any natural disaster the US has ever faced and reaches a point that it could hurt the country for years after. Bottom line, Cascadia alone deserves a bit more respect than we give it so I doubt I was 'slandering their ability to be rational' when I said we don't take these things seriously.
I won't ridicule it. It's a good example. But I'd follow up immediately with a non-rhetorical question of whether or not this is a risk too low to act on, or one too expensive to act on. If things are as bad as you say, then the only action that might truly be reasonable to mitigate it would be to just move far away. But that's also one of the most expensive actions to take... not to mention the crazy sunk cost fallacy holding over the tops of everyone's heads that will only ever get worse. Certainly spending an extra $200,000 building a new house (on top of whatever the general cost of building new), so that if you happen to be home and not at the strip mall or work or anywhere else, you only have a slightly better chance of surviving uninjured seems a little absurd. Probably better off to just take the hit to your career and the kids' school performance and move to the midwest at that point.
The threshold for many of these people is just set to a different point than yours. They have some understanding of the risk, but think that they merely have to endure that risk and hope to remain lucky.
For it to be a bigger risk than other risks actively being worked on.
Even a group of millions can only work on so many things at once. The Lower Midwest and the Dixie region of this country have: Gun violence, Racist violence, Tornadoes, some have hurricanes, military service as a key means of social uplift, systemic poverty, low health care rates, lower life expectancy, dubious educational outcomes.
All of those kill people every year. When was the last earthquake fatality in the Nidwest? Killer bees kill something like a person per decade, far more than earthquakes (in the discussed regions), and no one thinks those are serious problem.
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/when-sleep...