When coastal geologist Joseph Kelley first visited Down East Maine in the early 1980s, local people told him that young brides could rarely count on inheriting their grandmothers’ fine china because dishware seldom survived a generation in the region’s weak but frequent earthquakes. In the years since, Kelley has learned that the line where the land meets the sea in Maine is an extremely fluid, even shaky, place to live.
 
While coastal Maine can’t hold a candle to California in the quake department — we have what Kelley calls a “passive continental margin” — Washington County has seen some serious shakes in the past. In 1869, most of Eastport harbor slipped into the ocean during a temblor. It’s still a rare year that the region’s residents don’t see their chandeliers sway with some small but abrupt bedrock quivers.
 
At one time, geologists theorized that the Maine coastline was unstable because they thought it was slowly sinking, on the rebound, as it were, from its rapid rise when it was freed of the weight of the last ice age’s glaciers. Current evidence, though, points to a phenomenon known as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a volcanic fracture in the earth’s crust that is slowly but surely pushing North America and Europe farther apart. “Pressure gets concentrated at pre-existing weak points and results in an earthquake,” Kelley observes. One of those weak points lies right along the coast
 
While the quakes way Down East are more a curiosity than a danger, they do give new meaning to that old saltwater expression, “Shiver me timbers.”
 
(Published August 1998)