75 years ago, Milwaukee experienced the most severe earthquake in Wisconsin history

It felt like a bomb had exploded. Dishes in their cabinets shook, furniture shook, and people ran out of their homes and offices to see what was happening from the street. But by the time anyone could catch their breath, the largest earthquake ever recorded in Wisconsin was over.

At 3:27 p.m. on the afternoon of May 6, 1947, the earthquake struck the southeastern part of the state for less than a second. “Our house was shaking like a leaf,” a Milwaukee resident told the Milwaukee Sentinel. The consoles were jammed with frantic inquiries – was it a blast? A Met Office worker in the Milwaukee Journal said the sensation didn’t feel deep enough for an earthquake to occur, but rather that it “felt as if one of the elevators had fallen.”

But the record was soon corrected by Reverend Joseph Carroll, a professor of physics at Marquette University who had been monitoring the university’s seismograph. However, the device was unable to obtain an accurate reading of the magnitude of the earthquake. “Let me describe it this way,” Carroll told the magazine that day. The pens on the seismograph moved very slowly on the first tenth of a second. Then, on the second tenth of a second, the two pens completely jumped off the paper record, resulting in The machine stopped working.

The experiences of local people largely shape the memory of the 1947 earthquake today. Besides capturing an intensity level on the Richter scale – determined by readings on seismographs – scientists also collect accounts from people who experienced an earthquake to determine its intensity.

“Whenever a big earthquake happens, people call and say, OK, this happened or this happened…my dishes fell, my house flattened, whatever it was,” explains Brett Ketter, a seismologist at UW-Milwaukee. These “feeling reports” help seismologists piece together how the event occurred, even without a clear reading.

The anomaly in the 1947 earthquake is that its epicenter was in Wisconsin, which suffers from seismic drowsiness. “We’re nowhere near an active plate boundary – the one to the east is in the mid-Atlantic and the one to the west is in California,” Ketter explains. There are active fault zones in Indiana, and earthquakes have set off from there. But to put it simply, Wisconsin is “almost completely seismic,” says Ketter.

Seismologists have ideas but no firm conclusions about why the 1947 earthquake occurred. A 2021 report in Seismological Research Letters estimates that the earthquake was shallow, causing the region to shake with such force. Its strength is likely 3.8, which is classified as a minor. The buildup of pressure on the plate beneath the surface of Wisconsin, due to water level changes in Lake Michigan, caused the ground to suddenly shake.

Regardless of the cause, it is highly unlikely that the event was caused by human activity, such as an explosion. It bears the hallmarks of a real earthquake, even without a clear seismic reading. “It’s too bad; I’d love to see that record,” says Ketter. “Heck, maybe I’ll get it [it] tattooed

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