A 200-Year-Long Earthquake in America That Never Truly Ended

Bright Side

An earthquake in America lasted more than 200 years — and some scientists say it never truly ended. In this video, we explore what actually happened, where it took place, and why the ground may still be adjusting today. This wasn’t one sudden shake, but a slow, ongoing geological process that keeps surprising researchers. We’ll explain the science in simple terms and separate real risks from myths. If hidden dangers beneath our feet fascinate you, this one will grab you.  Animation is created by Bright Side.  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Music from TheSoul Sound: https://thesoul-sound.com/   Check our Bright Side podcast on Spotify and leave a positive review! https://open.spotify.com/show/0hUkPxD34jRLrMrJux4VxV  Subscribe to Bright Side: https://goo.gl/rQTJZz  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Our Social Media:  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brightplanet/  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brightside.official  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@brightside.official?lang=en   Stock materials (photos, footages and other):  https://www.depositphotos.com  https://www.shutterstock.com  https://www.eastnews.ru  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  For more videos and articles visit: http://www.brightside.me  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  This video is made for entertainment purposes. We do not make any warranties about the completeness, safety and reliability. Any action you take upon the information in this video is strictly at your own risk, and we will not be liable for any damages or losses. It is the viewer's responsibility to use judgement, care and precaution if you plan to replicate.

Transcript

00:00The strongest earthquake ever to strike east of the Mississippi River that happened over 200 years ago was never over, according to some scientists.

00:10Most earthquakes last seconds to minutes, and the official record-breaker so far is a silent one in Sumatra that was going on for 32 years.

00:19This slow-slip event triggered a massive quake and a tsunami.

00:22So if it's true that the new Madrid earthquake is still sending aftershocks, we'll have a new top name for this sad list.

00:31The earthquake started in December of 1811 with a powerful quake in a sparsely populated part of northeast Arkansas.

00:39They felt the shaking almost 1,000 miles away in the White House, and the tower bells were ringing in Boston even further away.

00:46It even made the mighty Mississippi flow backward for a few minutes over new waterfalls formed by shifted ground.

00:53The town of New Madrid, Missouri, completely disappeared in the disaster.

01:00The Earth wouldn't stay still until the end of January the following year, when things got serious again.

01:06A massive quake hit, this time near the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, right in the Missouri boot heel.

01:13Geologists believe it was a rupture on the New Madrid Fault, putting even more strain on the nearby Real Foot Fault.

01:21Just when people thought it couldn't get worse, another two weeks of trembling passed, and the Real Foot Fault snapped deep beneath New Madrid.

01:30Down in Tennessee, about 15 miles south of New Madrid, the ground uplift created Real Foot Lake.

01:37Steamboats were chugging along the river, with thousands of trees floating and acres of woods torn apart by the quake.

01:43In St. Louis, Missouri, which is 160 miles away, buildings were badly damaged, and chimneys fell in Cincinnati, Ohio, 400 miles away.

01:53People all the way in Montreal, Canada, over 1,000 miles away, felt the Earthshake.

01:59Seismologists have registered about 200 small earthquakes in the New Madrid seismic zone every year since 1974.

02:09Some researchers believe that up to 30% of those were aftershocks from those big quakes back in 1811 and 1812.

02:17In parts of the U.S. where there's not much tectonic action going on, these aftershocks could keep rumbling for years, maybe even centuries, after the big ones hit.

02:28Aftershocks are the Earth's way of releasing all that built-up stress from the main quake.

02:33When the ground shakes from the first earthquake, it puts a lot of pressure on the rocks nearby.

02:39And when those rocks can't take it anymore, they crack, causing even more shaking.

02:44That's the aftershock.

02:45And they can be pretty intense, especially right after the main quake, but weaken over time.

02:51Not all scientists agree that contemporary earthquakes have to do with those from 200 years ago.

03:00We mostly associate faults with those lines where Earth's plates meet.

03:04But there's a whole network of those right under the center of the North American plate.

03:08They're like relics from 750 million years ago, when North America was part of a supercontinent called Rodinia.

03:16When Rodinia started to break up, it left behind these rifts, weak spots in the Earth's crust that run deep beneath the modern Midwest.

03:25It could explain the earthquake action.

03:28An international team of geologists decided to take a fresh look at three major earthquakes that shook North America and end the debate.

03:36They used a new math method called the nearest neighbor.

03:39It says that if earthquakes are too close in space, time, and magnitude to be independent background events, then one is assumed to have triggered the other.

03:49Depending on how you look at the numbers, somewhere between 10 to 65 percent of the recent quakes in the region could be aftershocks of those historic earthquakes.

03:59And a huge quake that hit Charleston, South Carolina, at the end of the 19th century, might explain up to 72 percent of the earthquakes in the area since then.

04:09But not all places are the same.

04:12So the scientific debate continues.

04:17In 1774, British explorer James Cook noticed a glow in the distance.

04:22It was the volcano of Mount Yasser in Venuatu.

04:26This bad boy had been spewing lava and ash ever since, and is quite likely that it's been doing that for way, way longer.

04:34The volcano has been sitting at alert level since October 2016, which means things are really unsettled around there.

04:42They've even marked off a 2,000-foot radius around the crater to keep people safe.

04:47There have been low to moderate outbursts, shooting out ash, gas, and steam, and some bigger blasts throwing stuff outside the crater.

04:55Satellite images have picked up on some hot spots of sulfur dioxide plumes, showing that Yasser is still cooking up a big storm down there.

05:05Stromboli, one of the volcanic islands near Sicily, officially has the Guinness World Record as the longest continuously erupting volcano.

05:14It has been putting on a fiery show for over 2,400 years straight.

05:19Ancient sailors nicknamed it the lighthouse of the Mediterranean.

05:23Most of the time, Stromboli is just spitting out spatter.

05:26But every now and then, it throws in some lava flows or shoots up some moderately high fountains.

05:33Sometimes, you might even catch a glimpse of steam-driven outbursts.

05:37Over 200 million years ago, the world went through a major makeover, with not one, not two, but four massive volcanic eruptions changing the game.

05:49It all happened in Renzelia, a large chunk of island that used to be a supermassive volcano stretching across what's now British Columbia and Alaska.

05:59This volcanic activity might have helped dinosaurs grow from cat-sized critters into giants we saw in Jurassic Park.

06:07It kicked off a 2-million-year rainy season.

06:10It made the whole world hot and humid, and the dinos just loved it.

06:14Researchers dug deep into sediment layers beneath an ancient lake in China to uncover these secrets.

06:21They found traces of volcanic ash and mercury, clear signs of those epic eruptions.

06:27There were carbon signatures showing huge spikes in carbon dioxide levels, making the atmosphere toasty and the rain pouring down.

06:35It all happened in four separate pulses, each triggered by those monstrous volcanic blasts.

06:40There's a spot in a national park, not too far away from Sydney, Australia, where a fire has been raging deep underground for at least 6,000 years.

06:53They call it Burning Mountain, and it's a coal-seam fire, burning its way through a layer of coal beneath your surface.

07:00Once these underground fires start, they're pretty much impossible to put out.

07:04This ball of fire is up to 30 feet wide and extremely hot, but there's no flame.

07:10It's smoldering.

07:11The fire has been creeping along at a pace of about 3 feet per year.

07:15A local farmer first spotted it in the 19th century and thought it was a volcano.

07:20The people who have lived here for ages believe this place is sacred.

07:24They've used it for cooking and crafting tools, and tell that it started from a widow's tears or the torch of a hero.

07:31But experts think it could have been a lightning strike or coal heating up like a summer barbecue from the interaction with oxygen.

07:42Some say it might have been burning since before the dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

07:46No one knows exactly how long this mountain will burn or in what direction it'll move.

07:52Right now, the coal has enough oxygen to burn for centuries or even millennia without human intervention.

07:57The fire is heating up the mountain like a giant oven, making it crack and crumble, inviting in more oxygen to feed on.

08:05Even if humans decide to take action, these coal seam fires need truckloads of water and liquid nitrogen to tame them.

08:13Several years ago, explorers noticed that the smolder was creeping close to a cliff overlooking a little river.

08:19And depending on what the coal seam decides to do next, we could see some dramatic changes here in the coming decades.

08:27There could be flames with much more heat, or the coal seam could go deep, extinguish itself, and smolder out.

08:34A magnitude 15 earthquake has the potential to completely destroy our planet and evaporate all the water in a matter of seconds, leaving Earth uninhabitable.

08:48Over half a million earthquakes happen annually, but none have a magnitude of 15.

08:5390% of quakes occur in the terrifying ring of fire zone located around the Pacific Ocean.

08:59The ground there is like Jell-O. It shakes almost constantly.

09:04The most powerful earthquake to have ever struck Earth had a magnitude of 9.5.

09:10That much power can lengthen or shorten the day.

09:13But there's probably an earthquake in the confines of your own home now caused by a speck of dust landing on a table.

09:20But it has a power of negative 15 magnitudes.

09:23Earthquakes happen when tectonic plates move.

09:28They're like Lego pieces that are not properly secured.

09:31And when they move up, down, or hit one another, the ground also moves, triggering earthquakes.

09:37This tectonic energy acts like a battery.

09:41It stores energy for a long time, up to 500 years.

09:45When this stored energy is released in a sudden burst, the consequences are horrifying.

09:50Even the strongest structures submit to this relentless force that leaves a trail of destruction in its path.

09:58In some instances, earthquakes can even trigger tsunamis, amplifying the chaos.

10:03Such a crazy amount of power can split the ground open and cause severe damage.

10:10The strength of an earthquake is measured by the Richter scale.

10:13But now it's being replaced by the Moment Magnitude scale.

10:17When there's an earthquake, we hear about how strong it is.

10:20It's usually from 1 to 10.

10:23Luckily, we haven't had a Richter scale earthquake yet.

10:26The most powerful earthquake to have ever happened in modern history occurred in Chile in the 60s.

10:32It was around 9.5 on the Richter scale, and it altered Earth's rotation and messed up the length of the day by around 2 milliseconds.

10:41It also triggered a massive tsunami and affected a vast area of 155,000 square miles.

10:48The Richter scale doesn't actually have a limit.

10:51Still, anything above 25 doesn't need measuring, because if that ever happened, we would simply turn into dust, and nobody would care to measure this disaster.

11:01As we said, the strongest earthquake had a magnitude of 9.5.

11:07If this magnitude had been just 0.5 stronger, it would have created a ruptured line 2,174 miles long.

11:16That is almost seven times the size of Wyoming.

11:19A magnitude 11 earthquake would create a crack halfway around the world.

11:25Massive tsunamis would hit coastal areas, destroying everything, and Earth would get into a massive environmental crisis.

11:33If you love hiking, you would have new mountains to explore, created by the terrifying earthquake.

11:39Even the temperature would increase because of volcanic eruptions and the resulting greenhouse gases.

11:44It would turn our planet into a hot oven.

11:47The safest places would be far away from any buildings, seas, oceans, and mountains, where there would be a low chance of a landslide.

11:56Countries unprepared for earthquakes would be totally destroyed, and cities would turn into piles of rubble and dust.

12:04Going up on the Richter scale would only make things worse.

12:08But don't worry, an earthquake of that power is impossible.

12:12Earth's crust doesn't have enough energy to produce such earthquakes.

12:15But there is something that has much more power and can produce mega earthquakes.

12:22Asteroids are powerful enough to destroy our planet, as we all know from the dinosaur era.

12:27That asteroid was around six miles long, and it caused massive damage to the planet.

12:32It triggered earthquakes that shook the ground constantly for months.

12:36These terrifying quakes were about 50,000 times stronger than the Chile earthquake.

12:42They also triggered a tsunami that was 30,000 times more powerful than the Indian Ocean tsunami.

12:48And the latter was one of the most devastating tsunamis to have ever struck Earth.

12:54The earthquakes caused by the asteroid had a magnitude of 11, making it the most powerful and scariest natural disaster ever.

13:01And let's hope it stays that way.

13:04The Indian Ocean tsunami affected only certain areas of the world.

13:08Meanwhile, the asteroid tsunami affected every part of the world and had 33-foot-tall waves.

13:15Even if you had traveled to the most remote place on Earth, you wouldn't have been able to hide from this grim reaper.

13:21A 15-magnitude earthquake wouldn't be 15% stronger than the Chile earthquake.

13:27The scale doesn't work like that.

13:29It would be around 100 million times more powerful than a 9.5-magnitude quake.

13:35It could make all the water on Earth evaporate, leaving us devastated and without any H2O to survive.

13:42All ecosystems would collapse.

13:44All food chains would be broken.

13:46And only some super-strong bacteria would probably survive the impossible.

13:52That is, only a fraction of the frightening things that could happen.

13:56The ocean is like the AC for our planet.

13:59Without it, Earth would be super hot.

14:02The ocean also serves as a shield from the sun's powerful rays.

14:05It acts as a heat absorber and cools Earth.

14:08Scientists think that the most dangerous thing would be the inability of Earth's crust to survive the violent shakes of the 15-magnitude earthquake.

14:18If our planet miraculously survived and didn't turn into dust, there would be massive openings in its crust.

14:24The ground would become gelatinous.

14:26It would randomly move up, down, left, and right.

14:30And no building would survive that.

14:32Our civilization would be brought back to the Stonehenge era.

14:35Tectonic movements like this are devastating.

14:39A similar thing happened in Japan when tectonic plates moved 165 feet from each other and then snapped back together, creating a 9-magnitude earthquake.

14:51No place on Earth is immune to this bone-chilling natural phenomenon.

14:55Still, certain places have higher chances of being destroyed than others.

14:59Like the Ring of Fire, where 90% of earthquakes happen.

15:03This is a place where earthquakes are almost everyday occurrences.

15:07The Ring of Fire is located in the Pacific Ocean.

15:10It forms a ring around the continents that surround the Pacific.

15:14There, several tectonic plates meet, creating highly unstable ground.

15:18To make the problem much more terrifying, 75% of active volcanoes are located in this area.

15:2690% of dormant volcanoes are also there, making this place extremely dangerous.

15:32Scientists carefully study this region to find a way to predict when the next earthquake might strike.

15:37The Ring of Fire is not the only place at risk of earthquakes.

15:42In California, along the San Andreas Fault line, two tectonic plates have been storing power for more than 200 years.

15:50The San Andreas Fault is 715 miles long and has the potential for a massive earthquake.

15:57This region has its fear of violent earthquakes like the one that happened in San Francisco in 1906.

16:03It had a magnitude of 7.8 on the Richter scale.

16:06Now, scientists' predictions are terrifying.

16:09They say that the chance of a 6.7 magnitude earthquake is very high in the area.

16:16If all hell starts to break loose, you should know how to survive.

16:20Avoid anything that might fall on you, like windows, closets, or unstable ceilings.

16:25The official phrase from emergency experts is, drop, cover, and hold on.

16:30Stay low to the ground.

16:32Hide under something stable like a table, and remain there until the shaking stops.

16:37Make sure to stay in your shelter for another minute or two, just in case there are aftershocks or loose debris.

16:43Use your nose and smell for gas.

16:45If you do smell it, don't turn the lights on or do anything that might ignite it.

16:50Stay strong and be safe.

16:53That's it for today.

16:54So hey, if you pacified your curiosity, then give the video a like and share it with your friends.

16:59Or if you want more, just click on these videos and stay on the bright side.

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