February is … Earthquake Awareness Month in Missouri?!

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about. In Missouri, February is the designated month in which state agencies want us to be preparing for a seismic event that, depending on whom you ask, is inevitable or impossible: a damaging earthquake along the New Madrid fault. The last “big one” happened in 1812.

In a recent study, scientists monitored movements along the fault for eight years, using GPS technology sensitive enough to detect a flinch no thicker than a fishing line. They found nothing shakin’, which means either that (a) the fault has shut off or (b) the Earth’s plates are squeezed together so tightly, they can’t move but will eventually explode with unimaginable, Book of Revelation-style violence.