Native American names extend the earthquake history of northeastern North America

In 1638, an earthquake in what is now New Hampshire had Plymouth, Massachusetts colonists stumbling from the strong shaking and water sloshing out of the pots used by Native Americans to cook a midday meal along the St. Lawrence River, according to contemporaneous reports.

When Roger Williams, founder of the Rhode Island colony, talked with local Native Americans, he reported that the younger tribe members were surprised by the earthquake. But older tribe members said they had felt similar shaking four times in the past 80 years.

In his talk at the Seismological Society of America's Annual Meeting, Boston College seismologist John Ebel urged his colleagues to collect more information about past earthquakes in eastern North American from Native American stories and languages.

Although it might not feel like earthquake country to a Californian, for example, northeastern North America experiences regular seismic activity and has hosted large earthquakes in the past. Written records of these earthquakes include the past 400 years, but Ebel said extending this record further into the past with the help of Native American knowledge can help scientists better understand earthquake hazard in the area.

Sometimes the clues to past seismic activity are in Native American place names, Ebel said. There's Moodus, Connecticut, for instance. Moodus comes from an Algonquin dialect and means "place of noises." For hundreds of years, people have heard "booms"-as if echoing in an underground cavern-in the area. Ebel said the Moodus noises are similar those he heard as a graduate student camping in the Mojave Desert following a magnitude 5.1 earthquake.

"The Moodus noises sounded like distant thunder of a boom coming up from the ground, very similar to what I heard from the California aftershocks several years before," said Ebel, who noted that modern seismic instruments have recorded earthquake swarms in Moodus. "So the 'place of noises' means that they were hearing earthquakes long before Europeans came to that locality."

Then there's the regular small earthquake activity in the northwest suburbs of Boston, where Ebel and his colleagues have been monitoring since the mid-1970s. "I was going through books one day looking for information on historical earthquakes there, and I come across this WPA guide from the 1930s, and it's talking about Route 2, which runs right through that area, and it goes right near a hill called Mount Nashoba," he recalled.

The guide included "a little translation that said Nashoba is from an Indian word that means 'hill that shakes.' So now I've got all of these little earthquakes, and right in the center of it is a place with an ancient name that means hill that shakes," Ebel said.

Researching which tribes in the region have a word for earthquake could be useful, "because that would suggest that earthquakes were a rather repetitive thing," he noted. His early searches indicate that the Seneca, Cayuga, Natick and Mi'kmaq tribes all have a word for earthquake.

Ebel said interdisciplinary research with ethnologists with more detailed knowledge about Native American languages and narratives could be very helpful to seismologists looking to extend the northeastern North America earthquake record into pre-colonial times. "If there are legends that preserve information about probable earthquakes, for instance, it might be possible to define some sort of estimate of [shaking] intensity from the descriptions in the stories," he suggested.