New Madrid(1811-1812)
In the autumn of 1811, the United States was barely 35 years old. The fledgling nation included only 17 states, all east of the Mississippi River, but it boasted a lot of new territory thanks to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Neither the buyers nor the sellers knew that the recent addition's basement contained a seismic time bomb nearly ready to go off
At around 2:15 a.m. on December 16, 1811, a series of massive earthquake pummeled what is now southeastern Missouri and northeastern Arkansas with ground motions so strong that trees snapped in two as they whipped back and forth. The landscape rose several meters in some areas and sank in others, changing the courses of creeks and waterways. During one of the quakes, even the mighty Mississippi was diverted; portions near the quake's presumed epicenter flowed backward for at least several hours, and possibly a day or more. People felt the temblor as far away as New York state, and seismic vibes from an aftershock that struck at dawn traveled almost as far, reaching residents in Georgia and what would soon become the state of Louisiana.
Another quake of a similar size , maybe an aftershock, or maybe a separate quake along a different portion of the same fault zone - rumbled on January 23, 1812. The final major shaking in the series came about two weeks later, on February 7, when spreading seismic waves flung books from their shelves in Charleston, S.C., and rattled cups and saucers in Washington, D.C.
As in an episode from some apocalyptic tract, fissures opened, lakes were drained and re-formed, and, in what seemed the ultimate act of divine intervention, the Mississippi River changed course and appeared to flow backward. On December 15, 1811, Scottish naturalist John Bradbury was docked just upstream from the Chickasaw Bluffs ( Memphis), asleep until startled by "a most tremendous noise." "All nature seemed running into chaos," he recollected, "as wild fowl fled, trees snapped and river banks tumbled into the water." One of the disaster's few written accounts (owing to the damage occurring in a region marked by widespread illiteracy), the story nonetheless transmuted into evangelical oral history, signifying not an aberrant almanac season, but the end of the world.
Constraints on the faulting that took place during the 1811-1812 earthquakes comes primarily from three sources: historical accounts, including far-field intensity data and eyewitness reports from the epicentral zone , seismological effects remaining from the earthquakes, such as preserved liquefaction features and present-day seismicity in the rupture zone , and the physical structure of the crust of the 1811-1812 fault zone .
Chris Cramer,( a seismologist at the Center for Earthquake Research and Information), and colleague Oliver Boyd with the USGS in Memphis Boyd estimate that the first of the New Madrid quakes was around magnitude 7.6, and its aftershock was somewhat less than magnitude 7.2. The January 23 quake fell somewhere between magnitude 7.2 and 7.6, and the last quake in the series, on February 7, was the strongest and exceeded magnitude 7.6.
Others are gaining clues to the New Madrid quakes' magnitudes by looking at the geological scars left behind. One of the most dangerous effects of a major quake is liquefaction, a process in which the pressures created by seismic waves temporarily turn moist, poorly drained sediments --especially those bearing great weights, such as from buildings -- into something akin to quicksand. During the New Madrid quakes, of course, there was little large-scale infrastructure to be damaged. But soils in the area are largely made of thick layers of dense, river-deposited silt and mud interleaved with layers of water-saturated sand, conditions that primed the ground to liquefy. When the seismic shaking commenced, the weight of overlying mud pressurized aquifers, causing massive geysers of sandy water to spew onto the surface.
I want to mention series of earthquake’s phenomena which displayed in New Madrid seismic zone. First , The earthquakes were preceded by the appearance of a great comet, which was visible around the globe for seventeen months, and was at its brightest during the earthquakes. The comet, with an orbit of 3,065 years, was last seen during the time of Ramses II in Egypt. In 1811-1812, it was called “Tecumseh’s Comet” (or “Napoleon’s Comet” in Europe). Tecumseh was a Shawnee Indian leader whose name meant “Shooting Star” or “He who walks across the sky.” He was given this name at birth. A great orator and military leader, Tecumseh organized a confederation of Indian tribes to oppose the takeover of 3 million acres of Indian lands, which were obtained by the Treaty of Fort Wayne in 1809.
Next, the first steamboat travel on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers took place during the New Madrid earthquakes. On the night before the day of the earthquake, December 16th, the steamboat was anchored near Owensboro, Kentucky, about 200 miles east of New Madrid, Missouri. Their dog, Tiger, insisted on staying in the cabin with them instead of sleeping on the deck. Without realizing it, they were heading straight towards the epicenter of the greatest earthquake in American history. Their steamboat, intended to be an advertisement for steam travel, was thought instead to be the cause of the earthquake by many who saw it. At Henderson, Kentucky, where no chimneys were left standing, they stopped to visit their friends, the painter John James Audubon and his wife Lucy. Floating in the middle of the Ohio River they were protected from the earthquake tremors shaking the land, but not from the hazards of falling trees, disappearing islands, and collapsing river banks. After entering Indian Territory on December 18th, they were chased by Indians who figured the “fire canoe” had caused the earthquake, but they managed to escape capture by outrunning them. They even had a small cabin fire that night which they managed to put out. Thousands of trees were floating on the waters of the Mississippi as they approached New Madrid on December 19th, three days after the earthquake. They found that the town of New Madrid had been destroyed. They didn’t dare to stop and pick up a few survivors, for fear of being overrun, and they were without supplies. Most alarming was the fact that they had not seen a boat ascending the river in three days. They saw wrecked and abandoned boats. It was undoubtedly a miracle that they survived and kept on going.
The world’s largest sand boil was created by the New Madrid earthquake. It is 1.4 miles long and 136 acres in extent, located in the Bootheel of Missouri, about 8 miles west of Hayti, Missouri. Locals call it “The Beach.” Other, much smaller, sand boils are found throughout the area, also small pellets up to golf ball sized tar balls are found in sand boils and fissures. They are petroleum that has been solidified, or “petroliferous nodules (Seismic Tar Balls) .Another phenomena were lights which flashed from the ground, caused by quartz crystals being squeezed. The phenomena is called “seism luminescence.” And Water thrown up by an earthquake was lukewarm. It is speculated that the shaking caused the water to heat up and/or quartz light heated the water. Eyewitnesses told about Earthquake smog, how the skies turned dark during the earthquakes, so dark that lighted lamps didn’t help. The air smelled bad, and it was hard to breathe. It is speculated that it was smog containing dust particles caused by the eruption of warm water into cold air
Most earthquakes happen at the boundaries of tectonic plates. Tectonic plates are enormous pieces of Earth's crust and upper mantle that fit together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Wherever two plates meet, they either pull apart, press together, or slide past each other. Those movements cause large faults (cracks) to appear in the crust near the plate boundary.
The ground on either side of a fault moves very gradually. But sometimes the two sides get hung up on each other, unable to move. Stress builds to a point at which the two sides eventually snap apart, sending shock waves through the ground. Those shock waves are better known as earthquakes.
California is the country's most quake-prone state. It lies atop a boundary where the Pacific Plate meets the North American Plate. Those plates are sliding past each other in opposite directions. That movement has created a lot of faults.
The New Madrid faults are different. They lie in the center of the North American Plate, far from any plate boundary. Why would huge earthquakes occur there? Earth scientists have been asking that question since 1812. And if the earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 weren't anomalies-if others like them had occurred before-then they could probably happen again. But how soon?

Works Cited
Bagnall, Norma. On shaky ground: the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Print.
Csontos, Ryan, and Roy Van Arsdale. "New Madrid Seismic Zone Fault Geometry." Geosphere 4.5 (2008): 802. Print.
Mueller, Karl, Susan E. Hough, and Roger Bilham. "Analysing The 1811–1812 New Madrid Earthquakes With Recent Instrumentally Recorded Aftershocks." Nature 429.6989 (2004): 284-288. Print. "New Madrid." Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. 6th ed. 2013. Print.
Stein, Seth. Disaster deferred: how new science is changing our view of earthquake hazards in the Midwest. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Print.
Watson, Sally. The angry earth: a story of the New Madrid earthquakes. Bangor, Me.: Booklocker.com, 2009. Print.
Watson, Sally. The angry earth: a story of the New Madrid earthquakes. Bangor, Me.: Booklocker.com, 2009. Print.