If you asked your students where the largest Earthquake to ever happen in the United States was, they probably would not say New Madrid, Missouri. This lab is a forensic reconstruction of the 1811 New Madrid Earthquake.
 
The Mercalli Scale is used for this lab, which are numbers based on actual damage. Interviews of citizens after the earthquake are used to assign a Mercalli number to different locations, resulting in an isoline type map the students plot. There are several reflection questions that follow.