Important Takeaways:
- Sudden Swarm of Quakes near Missouri’s New Madrid Fault
- After a period of relative quiet, there’s a sudden swarm of quakes that have been recorded along the New Madrid Fault on Missouri’s border.
- If you pay attention to earthquakes, you likely saw that there were almost no measurable quakes along the New Madrid Fault for days. Now, the USGS is reporting a sudden mini-swarm of a half dozen quakes in the past day alone.
- I want to be clear that there is no reason for alarm as all of the quakes so far have been relatively tiny with the largest only measuring 2.5 on the Richter Scale.
- Earthquakes happen along the New Madrid Fault all the time. As we shared recently, there have been more than 175 New Madrid area quakes halfway through 2023 alone. But, we pay attention especially to swarms as experts now estimate a major quake could cause more than a billion dollars in damage which is double what was previously thought. The concern is that a swarm could signal a bigger quake about to happen, but earthquake science is still a field where there’s no way to accurately anticipate or predict a big event. Perhaps someday there will be.
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