South Dakota Isn’t Immune to Earthquakes – Here’s the Proof
We get earthquakes in South Dakota.
Living in South Dakota, we have plenty of natural disasters to deal with. We get tornadoes, thunderstorms, blizzards, ice storms, droughts, and wildfires. We also get the privilege of melting under triple-digit temperatures in the summer and dropping well below zero in the winter.
When it comes to nature's fury, South Dakota is covered. But there are a few big ones that we get to miss. As a landlocked state in the middle of the North American continent, hurricanes aren't much of a worry here. We're pretty far from any volcanoes. Well, I guess we are in the ash-path if Yellowstone erupts, but if that happens, we'll have lots more to worry about than the weather.
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How Common Are Earthquakes in South Dakota?
South Dakota also doesn't have to worry much about earthquakes. We are far removed from the destructive shaking, rattling, and rolling that the West Coast has to prep for. That’s not to say the ground under the 605 never shakes. We get earthquakes in South Dakota.
Since 1872, there have been nearly 100 earthquakes recorded in South Dakota, according to the South Dakota Geological Survey. None of them have been much to worry about, though, earthquakes in South Dakota "are not large enough to be considered threatening to life or property."
Earthquakes are the shaking of the ground caused by a sudden release of energy. The big quakes usually occur along fault lines, big cracks between continental plates of the Earth's crust. When those big plates move, they can release devastating energy, like waves on the ocean.
Why Does South Dakota Have Earthquakes?
In South Dakota, we don't have major fault lines. According South Dakota Geological Survey, "the likely causes of these earthquakes are adjustments deep in the basement rocks underlying the state or ongoing rebound of the earth’s crust from compression by ice sheets during the last ice age."
The power of an earthquake is recorded by seismic recorders. The measurement of an earthquake's strength used to be known as the Richter Scale. Nowadays, there are other, more precise ways to measure a quake's magnitude, but the 1 to 10 scale is popularly understood. '1’ is the weakest and ‘10’ the strongest.
The Largest Earthquake in South Dakota History
Most of the quakes in South Dakota register between 2.0 and 3.9. The biggest recorded South Dakota earthquake was on March 28, 1964, when a 5.1 shaker had its epicenter along the South Dakota-Nebraska border near Merriman, Nebraska. The next biggest was a 4.5 south of Huron, South Dakota, in 1911. The most recent quake recorded by the US Geological Survey was a 2.6 magnitude northwest of Wasta, South Dakota, on June 8, 2025.
Earthquakes in South Dakota during the 2020s
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