EASTHAMPTON, Conn. (AP) — Donna Lindstrom was lying in bed looking at her phone Wednesday morning when she heard a loud bang that rattled her 19th-century home in the central Connecticut town of Easthampton. heard.
Immediately, the 66-year-old retired delivery driver and dozens of other town residents took to social media to discuss the recent occurrence of strange explosions and rumblings, known for hundreds of years as “mudus noise.” did.
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“It was like a sonic boom,” Lindstrom said. “It was a really short and big impact. I felt it deeply, deeply, deeply.”
It was indeed a small earthquake with a magnitude of 1.7, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The region of central Connecticut has been plagued by earthquakes for years. (Fox News)
Robert Thorson, a professor of geosciences at the University of Connecticut, said thuds, rumblings and rattling sounds have been recorded for centuries in the East Hampton area, including the nearby village of Moodus, and that they were traced back to May 16. He said it dates back well before the last major earthquake recorded. , 1791, the stone walls and chimney were destroyed.
In fact, Mudos is an abbreviation for “Machimudos” or “Machimudos,” which means “place of bad noise” in the Algonquian dialect once spoken in the area. A local high school even nicknames its team “The Noises” in honor of its history.
Thorson said the phenomenon occurred so often that the federal government, concerned about the potential impact of seismic activity on the nearby now-defunct Haddam Neck nuclear power plant, conducted a study of “Moodus noise” in the late 1980s. It is said that this was carried out.
What they discovered was that the noise was the result of small but unusually shallow seismic displacements within the unusually strong and fragile Earth’s crust, amplified by cracks in the rock and topography.
“There’s something tectonic about Moodus that’s creating this noise,” Thorson said. “And there are acoustic things that can amplify or change the noise, but there’s no exact answer for either cause.”
Thorson said there are a series of underground cracks and cavities in the area that may help amplify the sounds caused by pressure on the Earth’s crust.
“That would create a crunching sound,” he said. “You’ll know what this feels like when you hear the ice cracking.”
That doesn’t mean the area is at risk of a major earthquake, he said.
“The rift valley that was here[millions of years ago]is gone,” he says. “We replaced that with compressive stress.”
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That stress caused occasional crunching sounds and small earthquakes associated with “mudus noise,” he said.
“It’s something we all have to endure,” Lindstrom said. “I’m really glad I don’t live in California.”
