In one corner of a huge civil engineering laboratory on campus, Dr. Ronaldo Luna watches a machine shake silt from the Mississippi River until it liquefies.
“This is what would happen during a major earthquake along the Mississippi River,” Luna says.
Researchers don’t fully understand the liquefaction process for silts (they have a better understanding of how it works with sands), but Luna is confident, based on his tests, that a 6.5 magnitude earthquake or bigger would cause solid surfaces along the banks of the Mississippi River to turn, momentarily, into liquid.
This would be very bad. Read the full story here.
