A small earthquake and ‘Moodus Noises’ are nothing new for one Connecticut town

By PAT EATON-ROBB
Associated Press

EAST HAMPTON, Conn. (AP) — A small earthquake hit the small Connecticut town of East Hampton on Wednesday, but that’s nothing new. Seismic sounds known as “The Moodus Noises” have been reported in the East Hampton area and the nearby village of Moodus for centuries. In fact, Moodus is short for Machimoodus or Mackimoodus, which means “place of bad noises” in the Algonquian dialects once spoken in the area. A local high school has even nicknamed their teams “The Noises,” in honor of that history. Robert Thorson, an earth sciences professor at the University of Connecticut, says the bangs, rumblings and tiny quakes are caused by small but unusually shallow seismic displacements within an unusually strong and brittle crust, where the sound is amplified by rock fractures and topography.