Earthquakes in USA

At 2 AM on December 16, 1811, the earth began to shake terribly in the southern United States. Hunters and farmers from Missouri to Arkansas jumped from their beds in terror. The log cabins they lived in turned to rubble. A distant roar came from the nearby forests. Large trees were torn from the ground as if they were nothing more than weeds. Great cracks appeared in the earth. The cracks were so wide that not even a horse could jump over them. Flashes of light and the burning smell of sulfur caused people to panic. Geysers of sand and dust spurted from the earth. Some people thought this was the end of the world. In reality, it was one of the strongest earthquakes ever to hit the United States. And it was not over. During the next several months, more quakes hit. The most violent came on February 7, 1812. Its strength on the Richter scale, which measures the power of earthquakes, was 8.4 to 8.8. A number that high (over seven) means complete destruction. During this earthquake, the town of New Madrid, Missouri, sank 15 feet. The shock was so powerful that windows rattled in Washington, DC, which was about a thousand miles away. When the earth finally stopped shaking, everything looked different. For a while, the Mississippi River was shaken so badly that water flowed backward. The river overflowed its banks, and thousands of acres of prairie land became swamps. The Mississippi River was never quite the same again. Earthquakes do not usually occur in the southern and midwestern parts of the United States. Luckily, very few people lived there in 1811, so few people died. In general, earthquakes are pretty common. There are about one million earthquakes a year. The rocks beneath the land and sea are always shifting and bumping into each other. There is an earthquake of some sort somewhere on the earth every 30 seconds.