STEWART TO SIGN COPIES OF NEW BOOK ON NEW MADRID QUAKE

On the east side of Interstate 55, less than 10 miles south of Cape Girardeau, lies one of the largest sand boils in the world. Thousands of people pass by every day without noticing the 7-acre elliptical patch of sand formed nearly 200 years ago by the New Madrid earthquakes.

The site of this and other topographical reminders of the momentous New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 are mapped and catalogued in the new book "The New Madrid Fault Finders Guide."

Dr. David Stewart, its co-author, will sign copies at 3 p.m. Saturday at Hastings in the Town Plaza Shopping Center. He will read from one of his three earthquake-related books at 4 p.m.

This is the third in a trilogy of books Stewart and Dr. Ray Knox, a geomorphologist at Southeast Missouri State University, have devoted to the New Madrid earthquakes. The first, "The Earthquake that Never Went Away," discussed how the series of earthquakes -- the largest was 8.8 -- affect us today and is used as a text in engineering schools.

The second book, "The Earthquake America Forgot," tied together the political events of the time and reads like a history.

The new book provides road maps, drawings, photos and precise directions for actually exploring the fault zone. Sand boils, earthquake lakes, explosion craters, landslides, earthquake ponds and seismic sand ridges are all identifiable.

Stewart admits that the contours of the New Madrid Fault Zone are much more subtle than those of California's San Andreas.

"There are people who have lived down here all their lives and have walked all over and never knew what was under their feet," he said by phone from his home in Marble Hill.

The sand boil south of Cape Girardeau, now usually kept covered in wheat or grass to keep the sand from blowing, was formed when pressurized sand and water boiled out through a vent perhaps days after the quake.

The book provides nearly a mile-by-mile guide to I-55 south of Cape Girardeau into the Bootheel and outlines a number of fault-finding side trips as well.

It looks like a boring stretch of highway, Stewart said. "Suddenly you then realize the cataclysms that have been there. Then it's kind of an exciting trip."

In a chapter called "The Most Incredible Day Any River Ever Experienced," the guide also explains phenomena -- The Mississippi River reportedly flowed backward and waterfalls appeared -- reported at the time and discounted now by some scientists.

"We consider it a scientific breakthrough," said Stewart, the former director of the Center for Earthquake Studies at Southeast Missouri State University.

The guide enables anyone to become a researcher, said Stewart, who added that he has never gone into the area without finding some new evidence of the magnitude of this upheaval.

"No earthquake anywhere we know of in the world has left so much evidence 200 years later," he said.