posted on Feb, 20 2011 @ 02:23 AM
The thing that makes earthquakes more of a concern in the middle part of the country is that it is a whole different beast than what happens out on
the west coast. The New Madrid Seismic Zone has the potential to cripple the country in a way in which recovery would be long and difficult to say the
very least.
If something on the scale of what
happened in 1811-12 were to happen today, it would get
very ugly very quickly for everyone in the entire nation.
The work shows that applying hazard models to continental interior fault systems that have been designed for plate boundaries is likely to be
inadequate, said Eric Calais, a geophysicist at Purdue University, who also is a scientific adviser helping revamp a disaster preparedness plan for
Haiti.
"When it comes to earthquakes in plate interiors, one truly has to think out of the box and be able — and willing — to abandon plate boundary
concepts," he said.
Source
The pressures released in one area do not necessarily release pressure on the entire system, it only reallocates the pressure throughout. Imagine
dropping a dinner plate on the ground and then reassembling the pieces. if you were to push at a specific piece, you might get movement over on the
other side of the plate without ever touching that piece.
In the Sand Andreas, you have one plate sliding past another plate, in the NMSZ you have pieces of one large plate having pressure applied to it in
various ways,
If there are a series of earthquakes
throughout the region
you might just want to start paying a little closer attention.