Native American names extend the history of earthquakes in Northeastern North America

In 1638, the current earthquake in Plymouth, Massachusetts caused water to stumble, sprint, from the pots Native Americans used to cook their midday meals along the St. Lawrence River.

When Roger Williams, founder of the Rhode Island Colony, spoke with local Native Americans, he reported that a member of the young tribe was surprised by the earthquake. However, older tribe members said they had experienced similar shaking four times over the past 80 years.

In a speech at the American Society of Seismic Society’s Annual Meeting, Boston University seismologist John Ebel urged his colleagues to gather more information about past earthquakes in eastern North America from Native American stories and languages.

For example, it may not feel like an earthquake country to Californians, but Northeast North America experiences regular seismic activity and has hosted major earthquakes in the past. While written records of these earthquakes include the past 400 years, Ebel said that expanding this record into the past with the help of Native American knowledge will help scientists better understand the dangers of earthquakes in the area.

Sometimes, Ebel said the clue to past seismic activity is Native American place names. For example, there is Moores, Connecticut. Moodus comes from the Argonchian dialect and means “place of noise.”

For hundreds of years, people have been hearing about the “boom.” Ebel said Moodus Noise is similar to what he heard as a graduate student camping in the Mohab Desert following the magnitude 5.1 earthquake.

“The noise from Moodus sounded like a distant lightning or a boom coming out of the ground. It’s very similar to what I heard from the aftershocks in California a few years ago,” he said that modern seismic instruments recorded earthquake swarms in Moodus. “So, “the place of noise” means that Europeans had heard of an earthquake long before they arrived in the area. ”

Later, in the northwest suburbs of Boston, there is a regular small seismic activity that Ebel and his colleagues have been monitoring since the mid-1970s.

“One day I was writing a book looking for information about historic earthquakes. I came across this WPA guide since the 1930s, talking about Route 2 that runs through the area.

The guide included a small translation that said “Nashovah is from the Indian word meaning “swaying hill.” So now I have all these little earthquakes, and at the heart of it is a place with an ancient name that means a shaking hill,” Ebel said.

It may be useful to investigate which tribes in this area have the term earthquake. That’s because it suggests that the earthquake is quite repetitive,” he pointed out. His early searches show that the tribes of Seneca, Kayuga, Natic ​​and Mikumak all have the word of earthquake.

Ebel said that interdisciplinary research with ethnologists with more detailed knowledge of Native American languages ​​and narratives could be extremely useful for seismologists looking to expand North American earthquake records into colonial times.

“If, for example, there is a legend that stores information about the possibility of an earthquake, it may be possible to define an estimate of (shaking) intensity from the narrative description,” he proposed.