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The Not-So-Sold Earth: Remembering New Madrid

  • Julia Kagan (author)
Chapter of: Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life(pp. 94–98)

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Metadata
TitleThe Not-So-Sold Earth
SubtitleRemembering New Madrid
ContributorJulia Kagan (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0014.1.15
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/making-the-geologic-now/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
CopyrightKagan, Julia
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2012-12-04
Long abstract“What would happen to our thinking about nature if we experienced [non-human] materialities as actants?” Jane Bennett asks in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. One result might be a different way of thinking about earthquakes. The stresses and fault lines and tectonic-plate collisions that produce them are material forces whose actions can reshape the world in ways that profoundly affect human life. Earthquakes remind us that human lives take place against a background of geologic time and that human agency, however nature-bending, is ultimately shaped by the non-human context in which it operates. Living in a known quake zone where Earth’s tectonic plates meet means inhabiting a geol-ogy that feels very much alive, not buried in the remote past. Think Japan, Chile, and the other nations along the Pacific “rim of fire,” not to mention its eastern border: California, the American northwest and Alaska. This doesn’t mean that those who reside far from plate margins live in safety. Perhaps the strongest earthquakes to hit the United States in recorded history were intraplate, as geologists term it, not at a tectonic edge. They happened exactly 200 years ago in the middle of the North American Plate, in a place called New Madrid in the Mississippi River Valley. Three huge quakes hit from December to February 1811-12, with estimated magnitudes (the seismograph was not invented until 1896) as high as 8.1. The anniversary is a reminder that reverberations from immeasurably ancient geologic events can burst into the present without warning.
Page rangepp. 94–98
Print length5 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)