Native American names extend earthquake history of northeastern North America
15 comments
·April 18, 2025jandrewrogers
The history of earthquakes in New England is valuable because the long-term risks are more poorly understood than other parts of the US. We know there are a lot 5.x earthquakes, which do a lot of damage to the old European-style masonry construction which is still common there, but there is some evidence that suggests rare earthquakes are up into the 7.x range. If a 7.x earthquake occurred in New England, it would be devastating given the construction style of older buildings.
Much of the US builds to very high seismic standards by global standards due to lessons paid in blood but there are still unknowns in regions like New England and a lot of construction that is not particularly seismic resistant.
bpodgursky
Not only does brick collapse, it tends to flatten people when it collapses.
Wood frame houses, even flimsy ones, are less deadly in an earthquake even if they do collapse.
jessekv
What are bricks good at? Are they purely aesthetic?
Structurally speaking, concrete and wood clearly have their place, bricks just seem like a worse concrete to me.
bitwize
Over at the Mohegan Sun casino, there's an exhibit about Moshup, a giant from Mohegan folklore. Moshup was said to be a friendly giant to the Mohegans, the Wampanoags, and other tribes in the area, protecting them from harm from his home on Martha's Vineyard island. But he could be roused to anger; and his stomping footsteps around the New England countryside were thought to be the cause of Moodus's seismic activity. Certain geological features in Connecticut were of great importance to Mohegans, said to be Moshup's footprints (but called "the devil's footprints" by English colonists because you know, colonialism).
Growing up in Connecticut, you think you're relatively safe from earthquakes... until you read about the folklore around Moodus and other seismic hot sites, from Natives and from colonists, and then you get a little bit scared...
micromacrofoot
Colonization disregarded a lot of native data like this for hundreds of years — it's amazing that it survived through language at all. I always wonder how much we've actually lost... but we'll never really know.
A similar sort of "rediscovery" happened with crop rotation and soil renewal, natives had been using various methods for centuries but they were disregarded by european settlers.
neaden
Crop rotation was the standard method of planting throughout Europe in the middle ages, it certainly wasn't lost by the settlers.
engineer_22
Luckily they encountered a culture with writing, so their knowledge could be preserved for us today.
NoTeslaThrow
Well we have plenty of records of people who did pay attention. (American?) Society as a whole isn't very good at focusing on what will care about in the future.
Anyway, it's not easy to turn oral history into speculation about the literal past. There's a reason such work focuses so much on geology! It's likely oral traditions encode a lot more literal history than we realize, but the ability to verify or interpret this as "history" in the western sense of "historiography" may be fundamentally impossible for large swathes of it.
AStonesThrow
Yes, like “slash and burn” land management. And the “buffalo jump” method of chasing them off a steep cliff, falling to their death. And internecine tribal warfare, with constant usurpation of good land for farming and grazing.
Good stuff: bring it all back, with the human sacrifices we’ve already renewed?
micromacrofoot
Great example of how people throw out the good with the bad and are seemingly incapable of navigating nuance.
bpodgursky
Nobody really knows what North American civic life was like before contact. The cities all depopulated before intensive contact due to disease.
What settlers found were post-apocalyptic remnant groups.
NoTeslaThrow
Back? This country was built on taking and retaining land with violence. We just call it "property" now and act like everyone thinks this is fine. we now refer to human sacrifices as "essential workers" and "terrorists". Same fundamental dynamic tho—we just replaced the gods with the economy; but either way, people gotta die to keep it running.
AStonesThrow
Which country? I think you'll find that the Americas and the "New World" consist of dozens of nations, and the confluence of several empires and other overseas powers which sent people here, in the capacity of explorers, evangelists, colonists, traders, you name it.
And let us not discount the possibility that land in the Americas was the site of violence before 1492. Perhaps underpopulation kept that violent contention to a minimum, but surely, Indigeneous peoples learned warfare from practicing it on one another, whether in the Polynesian islands, AUS/NZ, China, or the Americas.
And, White people have used more varied means other than violence in order to get around. Indeed, there has been intermarriage, and economic trade, and all sorts of peaceful, in fact quite agreeable means, of intermingling our culture with the indigeneous ones. It was the same with the Norsemen, the Vikings, the Slavs, and Celts, just to name a few: sure, there was conquest. There was violence and raping and pillaging. But there was also intermarriage and trade routes and merchants who picked up quite willing spouses. It went in both directions.
Let's not attribute to violence what has also been achieved by diplomacy and peaceful means.
This reminds me of the Inuit oral history of the location of the HMS Erebus and Terror.
https://parks.canada.ca/lhn-nhs/nu/epaveswrecks/culture/inui...