In late autumn of 2215, the weakest southern section in the New Madrid aulacogen breaks and shatters, suddenly, without warning…

 

New Madrid residents could not have seen it coming. As in 1811, the quake once again is quite large – say 7.3 magnitude – and it does something completely unexpected. Here at mid-continent there is no slipping sideways, in the usual way of San Andreas quakes. Sideways is not possible. The mid-continental plates are too massive, the old cratons too thick and too strong. Like super concrete blocks made of granite, they surround and block any significant lateral movement within the tightly packed fault zone. The zone can only break and crumble, and so it does. The earthquake’s release of massive earth pressure forces the overlying crust to choose one of the only two options available to it – up or down. By geological chance, the crust submerges – crumbling as it goes. Everything on its surface crumbles and submerges along with it.

 

This is not unprecedented. In ancient days movement of California’s San Andreas fault caused a huge chunk of land, the Salton Sea Trough, to drop below sea level where it remains today. Similarly, this newly fractured southern block of the New Madrid seismic zone, some six hundred square miles in area (that’s only thirty miles north-south, only twenty east-west), settles deeper, severely breaking up into smaller chunks as it descends. Gigantic deep crevasses hundreds of feet long open wide, then close, across what were moments ago ordinary corn and wheat fields. And small town Americana. The affected land doesn’t submerge very far, perhaps only tens of feet here, a hundred or more there, but that is enough. The estuary’s massive waters rush in to cover the new low places, its vast weight pushing them still farther down.

 

In less than two hours, many cubic miles of heavy salt water from the Mississippi estuary have advanced northward in an almighty swoosh not seen on earth since the waters of the Mediterranean broke through and filled the Black Sea basin – which, incidentally, formed in ages past by subsidence due to massive compression at the junction of tectonic plates. Also coincidentally, that old Black Sea deluge almost certainly is the true origin of the persistent legend now known – and widely doubted by professional skeptics who profitably promote their own notoriety by in-your-face doubt – as the Biblical Flood.

 

Collapse of the southern New Madrid seismic zone is a trigger. Under the suddenly-added new weight of so much water, plus the great Father of Waters flowing massively backward again for the first time in a long time, the remainder of the zone shortly collapses, and the waters rush northward again. Up into Huck Finn country, and beyond. Their massive new weight now presses on the southern end of the adjacent Wabash seismic zone.

 

Already stressed and destabilized by the big quake, the Wabash zone too soon collapses, and the waters rush in. The process repeats, northward, then repeats again, and then again. Within a short time – let’s say by exactly 2:15am on December 16, 2215 – four hundred and four years since the last New Madrid great quake – the entire New Madrid-Wabash Valley-Midcontinental Rift-Great Lakes system is in a state of collapse from one end to the other.

 

By no means does the complex succumb quickly – the stages of advancing collapse northward are distinct. As each great chunk of the complex rift system gives way, hundreds more square miles of the surface fracture, break and crumble until, now more compact, they settle lower down into the earth’s crust. They are covered as the waters rush in, filling each new lowland as soon as it develops. Then within hours, a few days at most, the enormous added weight collapses the next segment northward. With the New Madrid segments submerged, the cataclysm advances on into the Wabash Valley and southern Indiana hills become islands. When the Wabash segments have all collapsed and drowned, up beyond Chicago and encompassing much of Lake Michigan, the Midcontinental Rift follows in turn, and then the Great Lakes Tectonic Zone – and the beloved lakes’ familiar outlines are changed forever.

 

In eastern Canada, running from Lake Huron up through Quebec and on into Labrador, is an old geologic feature known as the Grenville Front. The front is but one segment of a much longer scar on the earth’s surface. Little known to anyone other than geologists, this very ancient line known as the Grenville Orogenic Belt represents what has been called perhaps the most dramatic collision of continent-sized tectonic plates in the history of planet earth. Extending in linear fashion with few zigs or zags from southwest to northeast, Grenville has been studied and mapped from Mexico through Texas, across the American heartland to Eastern Michigan, Lake Huron and Ontario on up to Labrador, and thence across the north Atlantic past Scotland and into northern Scandinavia. In North America, associated outliers reach far underneath Appalachia and over into east Greenland. The “Front” segment located just east and northeast of the great lakes is considerably fractured and the underlying earth crust is thinner than elsewhere.

 

Piece by piece the collapse advances until failure of the Great Lakes zone brings this new North American rift into contact with the Grenville Front. With accumulated momentum, it is no contest. Even the Canadian Shield’s hard old igneous pre-Cambrian rock cannot stop the cascade from advancing through the Shield’s narrow waist just north of Lake Superior and on into Hudson Bay. The chain collapse of such a massive interconnected rift system is beyond any conceivable precedent, beyond human imaginations. Such massive earthquakes have never been seen or heard of since humans began recording their history. That ancient Noah’s-flood story is displaced by this all-too-real New Flood.

 

The Great North American Rift Valley has been born, and it will endure for millions of years. Unlike northeast Africa’s Great Rift Valley, this one is filled with ocean water. Accompanying the calamity, other unexpected phenomena play out. To the southwest, much of the eastern half of Texas collapses and drowns even before the Wabash collapse and advancing waters have completed their northward progression. Speculations after the fact focus on super-porous geology – this large region, though outside the fault zone, succumbed because of widespread weakening of the rock substrata by so many decades of hydraulic fracturing, making east Texas perhaps the most fracked place on earth.

 

In times past, desirous of countering widespread criticism of fracking, spokesmen for the old natural gas and oil industries long insisted that fracking had been routinely applied since the 1960s to ninety percent of the hundreds of wells in the region. And they were quite right. Contrary to their rationalizations, however, the massive fracturing of so very much subterranean rock over so many decades, up to depths of two miles and that much more laterally across eastern Texas, in combination with the colossal growing weight of water in the adjacent Mississippi estuary, is credited with causing the east Texas collapse. In 2215 neither the industry nor its lobbyists and sycophants are alive to face survivors.

 

In today’s economic reality, whether wastewater injection should continue is off the table.  Researchers at Stanford University have mapped the natural geologic stresses throughout Oklahoma and Texas and discovered that… faults oriented in a certain direction, relative to natural tectonic stresses in the ground, are the ones most primed to become active.  Faults that are critically stressed – that is, under enough natural force coming from just the right directions – may require a surprisingly small amount of additional force to rupture.  That pressure can be as little as a few pounds per square inch.

Man-Made Solutions for Man-Made Quakes. Scientific American, January 2017