COLUMBIA Mo.
In the year 1556, in north-central China, the largest earthquake ever recorded shook a several-hundred-mile area. Contemporary accounts describe buildings crumbling, the earth liquefying and an estimated 830,000 dead beneath the rubble.
Just more than 250 years later, a slightly less powerful quake and aftershocks shook Missouri and the Mississippi Valley in 1811-12. At the time, the mighty river was reported to have run backward, church bells rang as far away as Boston, and thousands died.
These two earthquakes have something in common that has stumped scientists ever since: Both occurred in the middle of a tectonic plate in the Earth’s crust, instead of at its edges. Called “intraplate” events, these earthquakes happen at large intervals often more than 500 years and are some of the Earth’s most catastrophic. But scientists today are still largely in the dark about their cause.
“We still don’t understand why we have earthquakes in Missouri. We are in the middle of this stable North American plate. We are not in the boundary. We are not bumping into another plate. But nonetheless we have big earthquakes here,” said Mian Liu, a geologist at University of Missouri-Columbia.
Liu and other University of Missouri researchers from the department of geological sciences plan to bring together students from the Chinese and American quake zones to do important research they hope will shed new light on intraplate earthquakes. Liu and his colleagues recently announced they received a $2.16 million grant, the largest of its kind in the department’s history, from the National Science Foundation.
The researchers, along with 35 University of Missouri graduate and undergraduate students, will travel to northern China over the next five years to work with students from two top Chinese universities. The Missouri grant application was one of 12 selected out of a pool of more than 500 to be part of the federal program called Partnerships for International Research and Education.
