Earthquakes can happen suddenly and without warning, but what if the tremors we feel today didn’t actually start today, but possible decades if not a hundred years ago. That might seem wild, but that’s exactly what researchers say they've begun to believe might be the case, after making some statistical inferences from historical seismic data.
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00:00Earthquakes can happen suddenly and without warning, but what if the tremors we feel today
00:07didn't actually start today, but possibly decades, if not more than a hundred years
00:12ago?
00:13That might seem wild, but that's exactly what researchers say they've begun to believe
00:15might be the case, after making some statistical inferences from historical seismic data.
00:21As part of a joint study between the University of China and the University of Missouri, researchers
00:25looked at data from three of the biggest North American earthquakes ever recorded.
00:29The quakes included one from 1663 in Quebec, Canada, one on the Missouri-Kentucky border
00:34in 1811, and another in South Carolina from 1886.
00:38All of those quakes were far from any of our planet's plate tectonic divides, meaning
00:41seismic activity there is rare.
00:43But it does happen.
00:44The researchers then mapped the seismic ripples from their points of origin, modeling the
00:48ones that followed in the next century or more, finding that by using a different statistical
00:52model called the nearest neighbor method, one that associates quakes that occur close
00:56together as being associated by proxy.
00:58The researchers say that the 6.7 to 7.3 magnitude earthquake which rocked South Carolina nearly
01:04140 years ago has likely been responsible for some 72% of all quakes in the region since.
01:10Meanwhile, the one that occurred near the Missouri-Kentucky border in 1812 was still
01:14rocking the area much later, and could be responsible for 23 to 30% of all quakes detected
01:20between 1980 and 2016.
01:26NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology