Native American names extend earthquake history of northeastern North America

Summary

Mount Nashoba, now a popular ski area, is the "hill that shakes." Credit: John Phelan/ Wikimedia Commons In 1638, an earthquake in what is now New Hampshire and Plymouth, Massachusetts, left colonists stumbling from the strong shaking and water sloshing out of the pots used by Native Americans to cook a midday meal along the St. Lawrence River, according to contemporaneous reports. When Roger Williams, founder of the Rhode Island colony, talked with local Native Americans, he reported that the younger tribe members were surprised by the earthquake. But older tribe members said they had felt similar shaking four times in the past 80 years. In his talk at the Seismological Society of America's Annual Meeting, Boston College seismologist John Ebel urged his colleagues to collect more information about past earthquakes in eastern North America from Native American stories and languages. Although it might not feel like earthquake country to a Californian, for example, northeastern North America experiences regular seismic activity and has hosted large earthquakes in the past. Written records of these earthquakes include the past 400 years, but Ebel said extending this record further into the past with the help of Native American knowledge can help scientists better understand earthquake hazards in the area. Sometimes the clues to past seismic activity are in Native American place names, Ebel said. There's Moodus, Connecticut, for instance. Moodus comes from an Algonquian dialect and means "place of noises." For hundreds of years, people have heard "booms"—as if echoing in an underground cavern—in the area. Ebel said the Moodus noises are similar to those he heard as a graduate student camping in the Mojave Desert following a magnitude 5.1 earthquake. "The Moodus noises sounded like distant thunder or a boom coming up from the ground, very similar to what I heard from the California aftershocks several years before," said Ebel, who noted that modern seismic instruments ha...