I remember the November 9, 1968, earthquake, which we felt here in Iowa. I was sitting at my Linotype at the local calendar factory, working overtime on a Saturday morning. The machine started to sway and one by one the presses shut down. The silence was profound.
One of these days, the New Madrid is going to let go. The Mississippi will change course. Memphis, which is the US city most susceptible to earthquake damage, will be destroyed.
Interesting...
Yes, this will be as nasty as the San Andreas!
And geologist Reed: I looked in my books and online for information because this earthquake spooked me, it shouldn't have happened and it is at a point of interest to me, going wayyyyy back.
So when I was googling myself, Reed's theory popped up! I jumped when reading just the first three sections. He is 100% right, I know it in my bones.
I wrote to him. Hope he replies!
Fascinating post, Elaine!
I remember my mother saying her geology professor in the early 1930s in Buffalo NY said one of the earth's oldest faults runs under western New York State (roughly, the Genesee Valley), down the Alleghany River to Pittsburgh. That always made sense to me, since the Appalachian Mountains are among the earth's oldest.
Perhaps that old fault is a branch of the system that connects the New Madrid and the St. Lawrence areas.
That is what Reed thinks. His paper is rather long but very interesting reading. He spent his life doing "hands on" geology rather than teaching so he became a storehouse of lots of diverse data.
I have heard really old geologists say, like the stuff they study, the older, the more information it has. 
I'm in Tampa. at a roughly similar point of latitude. about 12 degrees off longitudinally speaking though.
The volcanic activity increase in Alaska is interesting. Augustine is still active, as is Cleveland, and Karymsky on the Kamchata peninsula. Of course http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwd...cs/
current.html has a listing of many more active volcanoes, including Killuea, Popocetal, Colima and others.
What sort of activity is required before the skies start to darken?
Also, did you see the prediction by the Russian Asdtronomer that the sun would go into a period of reduced activity within 30 years and cause another mini-Ice Age?
Heh. My mom and dad say that, too.
The sun is a VARIABLE STAR. And the earth is an odd entity with landmasses that shift all over the place, the mantle being pretty slippery, I think, due to the tug of the moon plus the water sitting on top of the crust kind of "storing" the energy below? Like a blanket? And the living things on earth, too, a big blanket?
We have such an active planet!
About dirt in the stratosphere: most volcanic eruptions cause little climatic change because the dust is too low.
Only Great Eruptions shoot dust high enough, it doesn't filter back down for many months. In the last 300 years, this has happened only five times.
Major eruptions can affect weather around the world. Clouds of ash and sulfur-rich particles thrown into the stratosphere by large volcanic blasts reflect part of the sunlight reaching Earth, causing cooling of the atmosphere. The larger the blast, the greater the effect. A global cooling of about 1.5 deg. F (detected by modern sensors) continued for about two years after the Mount Pinatubo eruption. Cooling was so severe following the Tambora eruption that 1816 was called "the year without a summer" or "Eighteen hundred and froze to death." Cold temperatures and killing frosts in Europe and New England in America caused extensive crop failures and resulted in famine in post-Napoleonic France. Many farmers in New England left for the frontier in New York in search of better weather, swelling the American "Move West."
http://www.cotf.edu/ete/modules/
...izeserupt2.html
Hmm, seems not only great eruptions, maybe also major eruptions.
http://www.cotf.edu/ete/modules/...noes/
size2.html
different sizes of ejected material.
Marty, in the last 300 years, Tambura WAS the greatest eruption.
If you look back the last million years, no, it wasn't the greatest. We had some real doozies in that time period.
I think Mr. Reed is full of it. That earthquake occurred in a block currently leased by Hess Corporation, not Shell by the way. Has anyone thought about the fact that it is mapped 10000m below surface, right where a salt weld is? It's salt movement! Pure and simple!
The author of the original peice (Elaine) appears to be just another person with no experience or education in the field he/she is writing about.......just opinons - no facts.
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