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New Madrid Seismic Zone - Quaternary Fault Localities. Earthquakes with magnitudes equal to or larger than 2.5 are shown by the yellow dots. (Public domain.) When people think of earthquakes in the United States, they tend to think of the west coast. But earthquakes also happen in the eastern and central U.S.
New Madrid Seismic Zone. The New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ) ( / ˈmædrɪd / ), sometimes called the New Madrid Fault Line, is a major seismic zone and a prolific source of intraplate earthquakes (earthquakes within a tectonic plate) in the Southern and Midwestern United States, stretching to the southwest from New Madrid, Missouri .
The New Madrid seismic zone is a source of continuing small and moderate earthquakes, which attest to the high stress in the region and indicate that the processes that produced the large earthquakes over the previous 4,500 years, are still operating. It is the most seismically active area of the United States east of the Rockies.
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This map was created by a user. Learn how to create your own. This map shows the general area classified as the New Madrid Fault Zone.
The New Madrid fault zone (NMFZ) is a long-established weakness in the Earth’s crust in the central and eastern US where earthquakes have occurred for hundreds of millions of years. In 1811-1812, three large earthquakes (up to magnitude 7.5) caused severe damage to the area. 1 At the time, the region was sparsely populated; today it is a ...
A 2004 HAZUS report prepared by FEMA, based on a 7.7 earthquake occurring in the New Madrid Seismic Zone, estimates earthquake damages to be $296 billion dollars across the region and nearly 730,000 people displaced from their homes. In Missouri, the report estimates a direct economic loss of $69 billion dollars and nearly 87,000 damaged buildings.
The New Madrid seismic zone has been the source of multiple major (M ~7.0–7.5) earthquakes in the past 2 ka, yet the surface expression of recent deformation remains ambiguous.
