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The Earthquake That Made the Mississippi Run Backward | New Madrid 1812

Vanished Worlds

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In the winter of 1811-1812, three of the most powerful earthquakes in the recorded history of the contiguous United States struck the geological center of North America — twelve hundred miles from the nearest tectonic plate boundary, in a region where, by every model of plate tectonics, large earthquakes should not occur. The Mississippi River ran backward for several hours. Bells rang in Boston. Entire islands vanished overnight. A new lake formed in a single morning, drowning a cypress forest that still stands beneath the water today. This is the story of the New Madrid Seismic Zone — and the catastrophe the central United States chose not to remember.

CHAPTERS

00:00 The River Ran Backward
01:30 A Megaquake Where None Should Exist
03:28 December 16, 1811: The First Shock
05:25 Aftershocks and the Second Quake
07:05 The Ancient Reelfoot Rift
08:50 Bradbury, Brooks, and the Eyewitness Record
10:47 Tecumseh's Comet and Frontier Memory
13:03 Evidence of Earlier Earthquake Cycles
14:07 February 7, 1812: The Largest Shock
15:55 Reelfoot Lake Is Born
16:42 The Widest-Felt Quake in U.S. History
18:01 Collapse, Relief, and Forgotten Disaster
19:46 Modern Science Reopens the Case
21:19 Could It Happen Again?
22:07 The Risk to Modern America

PEER-REVIEWED SOURCES

Johnston, A.C. (1996). Seismic moment assessment of earthquakes in stable continental regions — III. New Madrid 1811–1812, Charleston 1886 and Lisbon 1755. Geophysical Journal International, 126(2), 314–344.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-246X.1...

Johnston, A.C., & Schweig, E.S. (1996). The enigma of the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–1812. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 24, 339–384.
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.earth...

Nuttli, O.W. (1973). The Mississippi Valley earthquakes of 1811 and 1812: Intensities, ground motion and magnitudes. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 63(1), 227–248.
https://doi.org/10.1785/BSSA0630010227

Tuttle, M.P., Schweig, E.S., Sims, J.D., Lafferty, R.H., Wolf, L.W., & Haynes, M.L. (2002). The earthquake potential of the New Madrid Seismic Zone. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, 92(6), 2080–2089.
https://doi.org/10.1785/0120010227

Mueller, K., Champion, J., Guccione, M., & Kelson, K. (1999). Fault slip rates in the modern New Madrid Seismic Zone. Science, 286(5442), 1135–1138.
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.286.5...

Hough, S.E. (2009). Cataloging the 1811–1812 New Madrid, central U.S., earthquake sequence. Seismological Research Letters, 80(6), 1045–1053.
https://doi.org/10.1785/gssrl.80.6.1045

Calais, E., Camelbeeck, T., Stein, S., Liu, M., & Craig, T.J. (2016). A new paradigm for large earthquakes in stable continental plate interiors. Geophysical Research Letters, 43(20), 10,621–10,637.
https://doi.org/10.1002/2016GL070815

Craig, T.J., Chanard, K., & Calais, E. (2017). Hydrologically-driven crustal stresses and seismicity in the New Madrid Seismic Zone. Nature Communications, 8, 2143.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-01...

INSTITUTIONAL REPORTS

Federal Emergency Management Agency & Mid-America Earthquake Center (2009). Impact of New Madrid Seismic Zone Earthquakes on the Central USA. MAE Center Report 09-03, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

U.S. Geological Survey (2014). Earthquake Hazard in the Heart of the Homeland. USGS Fact Sheet 2014-3026.
https://doi.org/10.3133/fs20143026

HISTORICAL PRIMARY SOURCES

Bradbury, J. (1817). Travels in the Interior of America in the Years 1809, 1810, and 1811. Sherwood, Neely & Jones, London.

Bryan, E. (1812). Letter to Lorenzo Dow describing the New Madrid earthquakes, 22 March 1812. Reproduced in Dow, L. (1849), History of Cosmopolite, Joshua Martin, Cincinnati.

Drake, D. (1815). Natural and Statistical View, or Picture of Cincinnati and the Miami Country. Looker & Wallace, Cincinnati.

20 Comments

@LionelAzemia 3 months ago (edited)

Mississippi flowing backward is just a walk in the park and ppl who cannot believe this have problems. I'm a Seychellois, the earthquake 2004 that happens in Indonesia register 9 on the scale. 240,000 ppl died. All over the African coast were warn to remove all boats and ships in the harbour and bring them out to the open sea. that includes Seychelles, Mauritius, Madagascar and every country in the Indian Ocean. How powerful is that thing? I watched the tsunami as it destroyed the streets and bridges in my country in my own two eyes. Now think of the distance from Indonesia to Seychelles, that's insane. Old and expert fisherman said they never seen something like that in there LIVEs and never know if something like that could exist. Only one ppl died in Seychelles. Indonesia was totally wrecked up side down. Ppl must understand the level of power and how dangerous earth could be. So Mississippi flowing backward, you better believe it.

@NikitaMikhailova 3 months ago

There is an outdoor drama still in Ohio called "TECUMSEH". I was in it in the 1970's. It speaks of all this from 1811-1812. And I went to college at Indiana University Bloomington. I took courses on earthquakes, ocean sciences & volcanoes. I was going to go back to Alaska to tell what I'd learned. The earthquake professor took us out to a small ridge cut thru by back country road near Bloomington. It showed 1 of the fault lines.

@philkenseben7 3 months ago

This fault is more dangerous to me than the San Andreas fault line

@shellydunn4566 3 months ago

I have kin that lived thru that.... pretty wild...
Had my Grandmother tell me about a cruise she left on in Alaska.... a big earthquake happened a week before.... she said you were walking on one side of the sidewalk, the other side was 12 ft above your head.

@marnamiller9773 3 months ago

Civilizations have been found 400 ft down and estimated 4000 years old.

@Cozydrone 3 months ago

Great work on this channel😊👍🇺🇸

@christopherhanton6611 3 months ago

glad you cover earthquake because i live in the area where it happened, Randolph County il

@Tokamak3.1415 3 months ago

12:45 that AI horse morphing it's head into where it's rear was a millisecond prior is nightmare fuel for some - perhaps worse than a large earthquake.

@Edward-ik2cp 3 months ago

Ya'll should research what Edgar Cayce predicted was going to happen along the Madrid fault and he's got a 88% success rate on his predictions

@nelliethursday1812 3 months ago (edited)

The great Indian leader Tecumseh was thrown from his horse (during the earthquake) and witnessed the mighty Mississippi River flow backwards he even wrote about it

@fnxlxmacronocomphcp 3 months ago

I've never forgot this I heard this sometime when I was young and I was the story always stuck with me when it happens again a lot more people will die from it cuz it's a lot more populated I live in Dayton Ohio and it worries me let alone people who lives closer to the epicenter hopefully it don't happen for a long time but what is already been over 200 years so it's just a matter of time before it happens again and it's going to be bad God bless you all stay safe out there

@thestevedoughtyshow27 3 months ago

We talked about this in earth science, that was 1972. For the same reason we have the mid Atlantic riff. The mountains on the west coast rise with the movement of the Pacific plate. This movement puts pressure on the continent. At the same time the mid Atlantic riff pushes outward, the distance between the two continents are moving away from each other. So now you have pressure on both sides of the continent. Now, take a peice of card board, put pressure on both sides of it, where does it bend?

@deepspire 3 months ago

Technically the Mississippi River did not flow backwards, only the top few feet was pushed upstream in a wave. It would have been like a tidal bore.

@DavidPreece-g2u 3 months ago

Why that boat have an outboard motor on it. Didn't know they had outboard motors in the 1800s

@19fetzohr90 3 months ago

The existence of Crowley's Ridge should be especially frightening. It is thin and runs for over 100 miles from north to south, mostly through northeast Arkansas, west of and roughly parallel to the Mississippi River, which once flowed on the WEST side of the ridge, which consists of soft dirt, meaning that the river could not have shifted GRADUALLY between its west and east courses, but CATASTROPHICALLY, possibly MULTIPLE TIMES.

@michaeldelisieux5252 3 months ago

Earthquakes start in the skies.

@AUSORIX 3 months ago

Very intresting story! We talked about this in earth science, that was 1972

@iCostHop9998 3 months ago

Thank You 👍🏼 🧐 📚📚📚

@broncbuck 3 months ago

Recent advances in deep ground investigating shows the Mississippi River bed is itself a massive crack in the continent filled with the silt of ages, cut open again by the last ice age melt run off of 12,000 years ago at the end of the last ice ages... it is a fault... it was just so deeply buried, it wasn't found until recent times...with tech advances..

@AllanHunter-c2l 3 months ago

Millions years ago where Az is now there it was reported that a volcano existed. Elevation of Tucson is higher than Phoenix due to all kinds of sand rocks trees, and cacti fill in.