With everything that has happened in the past year, what are the chances Wisconsin will suffer the devastation of an earthquake? Not very likely. Tonight, the Perpetual Notion Machine looks into this possibility by rebroadcasting an old show that originally aired on February 4, 2010. Our guest on that show was Chuck DeMets, a geophysicist in the Department of Geoscience at UW-Madison and an expert in plate tectonics. Madison and Wisconsin lie in the middle of the northern plate of the continent. However, Madison isn’t immune to minor earthquake shakes. The biggest earthquake potential lies along the New Madrid fault line, the center of which lies near St. Louis, Missouri. An earthquake in 1812 measured an estimated 8.3, and caused the Mississippi River to reverse and flow the opposite direction.

Image courtesy: Marcello Migliosi from Pixabay