MICHAEL SNYDER
Will 2026 be a year of great shaking for the United States? Coming into 2025, I thought that seismic activity would be a major global theme, and that has certainly turned out to be the case. This has been an extremely unusual year for earthquakes along the Pacific Ring of Fire, and volcanoes that have been dormant for ages are suddenly roaring to life all over the world.
Here in the United States, we have been experiencing lots and lots of little earthquakes, but thankfully we have not been hit by a really bad one yet. Will our luck run out in 2026?
According to the Daily Mail, the dozens of earthquakes that have been rattling the New Madrid fault zone since the middle of November are "renewing fears of a catastrophic natural disaster soon"...
A giant seismic zone in the heart of the US has seen dozens of tiny earthquakes break out in the last month, renewing fears of a catastrophic natural disaster soon.
Since mid-November, the US Geological Survey (USGS) has detected at least 38 low-level seismic events along the boundaries of the New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ) in Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee.
The threat that the New Madrid fault zone poses should not be underestimated.
In a previous article, I discussed the series of catastrophic earthquakes that occurred along that fault zone in 1811 and 1812. Everyone agrees that they were the most powerful earthquakes in the entire history of the continental United States...
The New Madrid earthquakes were the biggest earthquakes in American history. They occurred in the central Mississippi Valley, but were felt as far away as New York City, Boston, Montreal, and Washington D.C. President James Madison and his wife Dolly felt them in the White House. Church bells rang in Boston. From December 16, 1811 through March of 1812 there were over 2,000 earthquakes in the central Midwest, and between 6,000-10,000 earthquakes in the Bootheel of Missouri where New Madrid is located near the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.
In the known history of the world, no other earthquakes have lasted so long or produced so much evidence of damage as the New Madrid earthquakes. Three of the earthquakes are on the list of America's top earthquakes: the first one on December 16, 1811, a magnitude of 8.1 on the Richter scale; the second on January 23, 1812, at 7.8; and the third on February 7, 1812, at as much as 8.8 magnitude.
In 2019, USGS scientists modeled what a 7.7 magnitude earthquake would look like if it erupted along the Arkansas-Tennessee border, in an area near Memphis.
The shockwaves of this hypothetical mega quake spread for hundreds of miles, reaching cities including Kansas City, Indianapolis, Louisville, and Birmingham.
Buildings in that area of the country are typically not constructed to withstand an event of that size, and so the USGS is projecting that hundreds of thousands of buildings would be damaged and the economic damage would run into the hundreds of billions of dollars...
Since this region is not well equipped to deal with a massive seismic event, studies of such an earthquake projected that a magnitude 7.7 earthquake would cause over 86,000 injuries or deaths, damage 715,000 buildings, and knock out power to 2.6 million homes.
That report, by the University of Illinois, Virginia Tech, and George Washington University, also estimated that the cost could hit $300 billion directly, with indirect costs due to lost jobs possibly taking the damage to $600 billion.
An earthquake like that could hit us at any time.
But when the "really Big One" finally arrives, it will be much, much worse than the USGS is anticipating.
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