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Seismometers Are Giving Scientists a Clearer Look at a Giant Scar Under the American Midwest
When Doug Wiens approached Minnesota farmers to ask permission to install a seismometer on their land, he often got a puzzled look. "You could tell they were thinking 'Why are you putting a seismometer here?,' " said Wiens, professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. "'We don't have earthquakes and we don't have volcanoes. Do you know something we don't?' "
Actually, he did. Deep beneath the fertile flat farmland, there is a huge scar in the Earth called the Midcontinent Rift [phys.org]. This ancient and hidden feature bears silent witness to a time when the core of what would become North America nearly ripped apart. If the U-shaped rip had gone to completion, the land between its arms—including at least half of what is now called the Midwest—would have pulled away from North America, leaving a great ocean behind.
Weisen Shen, a postdoctoral research associate with Wiens, will be presenting seismic images of the rift at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA) Sept. 25-28. The images were made by analyzing data from Earthscope, a National Science Foundation (NSF) program that deployed thousands of seismic instruments across America in the past 10 years.
At last, the real reason Lex Luthor was in Smallville [wikipedia.org], to split open the fault and create beach-front property in the Midwest [wikipedia.org].
