Earthquake Rattles Northern Illinois, Southern Wisconsin

Quoted: “The crust in the Midwest has faults itâ??s inherited from a billion or more years of plate tectonics,” says Chuck DeMets, professor of Geosciences at the University of Wisconsin. “Even though most of them spend most of the time doing nothing, just buried, they are slowly concentrating stresses that build up in the crust. So occasionally they pop off small earthquakes and relieve some of that stress.”