Today’s 5.2 Earthquake

When looking at the articles about this morning’s 5.2 quake in the Midwest I realized that I had never posted the map drawing spirit did for the New Madrid region.  Here is where today’s quake happened today.

Here is Spirit’s map, the lower part everything between the two lines is a seriously high danger area.  You can barley make out the deep many fault they show in the middle, going through Mississippi.  The lines leading up from there are what spirit calls side faults, except for the one that veers off to the right, that is the continuation of the main fault through Mississippi.  Any one of the side faults is capable of having a fairly strong quake.  The kind of circular area is the greatest danger area for a future epicenter of a large New Madrid quake.  If a large enough quake hits the side faults could rupture to various degrees but these corridors would be the hardest hit outside the epicenter zone.  There are some light yellow lines off to the northwest of Louisville KY, on the north side of the main fault line, that have faded and are hard to see.  But one leads right out to today’s quake putting the quake at the very end of a side fault.  The faults shown are pretty deep, there are more faults closer to the surface especially in Tennessee but they are not capable of a really large quake.