Megaquake Predicted Near Missouri—Not Illinois or Arkansas

I want to be clear from the start that I am a skeptic about this, but I've learned this crazy prediction does have some truth and merit to it. A megaquake is predicted near Missouri and it's not in Illinois or Arkansas either. They say it's in a more dangerous situation than even the New Madrid Fault in Missouri.

A video just shared a couple weeks ago predicts a megaquake near Missouri, but not from Arkansas or Illinois

Have you ever heard of the East Tennessee Seismic Zone? Even though I am an admitted earthquake nerd, it's not a fault area I've ever paid any attention to. It ended up on my radar when YouTube channel Earthly claimed it was facing an imminent megaquake and even more dangerous than Missouri's New Madrid Fault. I will admit that I rolled my eyes a bit when I saw this because Earthly seems pretty outrageous sometimes, but the more research I did, the more I understood their prediction isn't without some merit.

How big a quake is the East Tennessee Seismic Zone really capable of according to the USGS?

The National Park Service shared a map from the USGS which DOES confirm the East Tennessee Seismic Zone is a high hazard area. While they don't say it's capable of the magnitude 8 that Earthly claims, they do show it's capable of a violent 7.5 magnitude quake. The USGS says the small hazard area may be larger than indicated due to the unpredictability and change in land conditions there.

Is Missouri's neighbor really in that much danger of a megaquake?

Ask anyone in western Tennessee and they'll tell you the New Madrid Fault is a much bigger concern since both Memphis and Nashville would likely experience damage if that fault were to suffer a major event. However, there has been an uptick of occasional magnitude 4 quakes along the Eastern Tennessee Seismic Zone over the past couple decades. There was a magnitude 4.1 quake as recent as this April of 2025 and there were two larger 4.7 quakes back in 1973.

Read More: Could Busch Stadium Survive a Major Quake?

While I am not agreeing with Earthly's claim that the Eastern Tennessee Seismic Zone is about to see a megaquake, it's an area that does deserve watching. There's a paper I found on GeoScienceWorld that reveals the "eastern Tennessee seismic zone experiences the second highest rates of natural seismicity in the central and eastern United States" just behind the New Madrid Fault. They looked into the stress along this fault area and said "they do point to a distinct state of stress and therefore distinct long‐term deformation within the ETSZ". That translates into the realization that the claims from Earthly that I thought were wacky aren't that crazy after all. It looks like Missouri's neighbor now has two potential earthquake threats to watch out for.