Shifting Ground

The devastating earthquake that struck Charleston in 1886 remains, at 7.4 on the Richter scale, the strongest earthquake to ever occur on the East Coast, but it wasn't the last by any means. Smaller tremors have since been felt once or twice a decade, most recently in 2014, when a magnitude 4.1 rattled the Lowcountry. In fact, South Carolina is the most seismically active state east of the Rocky Mountains. Summerville, for example, was shaken by two quakes, in 1912 and 1914, felt not only in Charleston but as far south as Savannah and Macon, Georgia. Charleston itself experienced a series of minor tremors in 1959, 1960 (two of them that year) and 1967.

courtesy USGS

Geologists have long identified fault lines criss-crossing the midland and upstate regions of South Carolina. They're the buried but readily located remnants of ancient plate tectonics some 500-million years ago, when colliding prehistoric landmasses raised the Appalachians. The gathering pressures along such known faults that may result in earthquakes can usually be detected well in advance, but Charleston lies hundreds of miles from the nearest fault-prone plate boundary, under the Caribbean.

Here on the coast, geologists can only estimate where fault lines may lie within underlying bedrock, since the bedrock is buried under up to 3 miles of layers of sand, silt, clay and sedimentary rock, making it difficult for even modern technology to perceive early warnings of a pending tremor.

King Street post-quake

The 1886 quake began as a barely felt tremor before the main earthquake rocked the city. Aftershocks were felt for another 24 hours. Sixty people were killed amid estimated damages of $160 million in modern dollars. In rebuilding, the city mandated "quake bolts" for new construction and for retrofitting on the few structures that remained standing.

The good news is that most geologists think such major quakes occur only every five hundred years or so, allowing some breathing room before the Lowcountry once again is all shook up.

On The Record

courtesy Post and Courier

Charleston can claim quite a few firsts in its three-hundred years as the anchor of the Lowcountry, and this month marks two of them - the founding of the Museum of Charleston as "America's First Museum", and The Post & Courier, the South's oldest daily newspaper (shown above after the 1886 earthquake).

Thompson Hall, the Museum's home in 1910

The Museum claims the older heritage, tracing its roots to January of 1773, when the 19 men who had established the Charleston Library Society thirty years earlier voted to expand their collection of books and manuscripts imported from Britain to focus on the natural history of the Carolinas. Despite the lack of a permanent home and a disastrous 1778 fire, the museum eventually found its first home in 1852 in the College of Charleston's Randolph Hall. By then, renowned naturalist Louis Agassiz visited the city and declared the Museum's collections to be among the best in the country. Surviving the destruction of the Civil War (much of the collection was moved to the Midlands), the Museum was officially incorporated in 1915 and marked another first when, in 1920, it named Laura Bragg as the country's first woman to lead a publicly supported museum. Many of the items from the Museum's early years can be seen today at the Museum's permanent home since 1980, on Meeting Street.

The Museum's peripatetic history was recorded by an upstart newspaper, The Charleston Courier, which published its first edition in January of 1803 under the leadership of editor Aaron Willington, a newspaperman who had moved to the city from Massachusetts. Determined to make The Charleston Courier the newspaper of record for the city, Willington was known to row out to ships arriving in Charleston Harbor from all over the world to scoop the latest international news, and was the first to hire a translator to comb Spanish language newspapers from the Caribbean. Just after the Civil War, Willington's newspaper merged with The Charleston Daily News to become The News and Courier. It continued under that name until 1991, when it merged with the city's only other paper, The Evening Post, to become The Post and Courier, now South Carolina's largest newspaper.

Folklore Forecasting

We've begun the year with a blast of arctic air, after a tee-shirt mild holiday season, so we got to wondering about what's ahead weather-wise according to some of the forecasting folklore peculiar to the Lowcountry.

There's the "twelve days of January" for starters, related to the Lowcountry's agricultural history and the farmer's need to time preparations for the spring growing season. The first twelve days of January are said to predict the weather for the rest of the year, with the weather on each of the twelve days indicating what to expect meteorologically for each of the year's months. By this reckoning, we can expect below average temperatures for most of 2025.

Miniature Meteorologist?

Lowcountry natives have always held that the temperature during warmer months can be determined from the chirping of crickets, and this folk belief actually has a scientific basis, formulated by one Amos Dolbear in 1897. Warmer temperatures make it easier for crickets to rub their wings together to produce the chirps, and Dolbear discovered that counting the number of chirps over fifteen seconds, and than adding 40, will produce a rough estimate of the outdoor temperature. We'll have to wait until late spring to test this one out, when crickets begin their annual concert.

Sailor's Warning - Dawn on North Beach

"Red sky at night, sailors delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning" isn't peculiar to the Lowcountry but this, too, has a factual basis for coastal communities. Weather systems generally move from west to east, following the jet stream, so if clouds bank up to the east but a clear red sunset is to the west, drier and clear weather can be expected the next day; if the eastern sky is red at sunrise, but with clouds arriving from the west, rain may be on the way. So those spectacular sunsets over the marshes we love to see actually can be harbingers of good weather.

You can test another folk belief at the coming spring equinox on March 20th. The spring and fall equinoxes are said to be the only time of the year when you can balance an egg on its end. The (faulty) reasoning is that since the sun is directly over the equator at each equinox, the earth's gravity is in balance. This isn't true, of course, at least as far as balancing an egg is concerned. But give it a go on March 20th and see what happens.