A cicada apocalypse is coming this summer: Will Pennsylvania be spared the noisy invasion?

History will be made this spring and summer.

Sure, there are trials and tribulations and RFK Jr.’s struggle with brain worms and other assorted calamities that have defined, well, the past few years.

But we’re talking about entomological history.

For the first time in more than two centuries, two different broods of cicadas are emerging – one comes out every 17 years and the other every 13 years. The last time it happened was in 1803 when, the website Cicada Safari noted, "Thomas Jefferson was President of the United States, and Lewis and Clark started their exploration of the Louisiana Purchase."

Brood XII – a 17-year cicada – will emerge in northern and central Illinois. The 13-year Brood XIX – cicada broods are denoted by Roman numerals, like Super Bowls – are coming out from their slumber in southern Illinois and Missouri, along with a crescent of emergences stretching from Louisiana across the south to eastern Virginia.

That means, unlike the emergence of Brood X in 2021, Pennsylvania will be sitting this cicada apocalypse out.

“We’re not going to have them emerge here,” said Michael Skvarla, assistant research professor of arthropod identification in Penn State’s entomology department. “There will be a smaller emergence in Centre County next year. It’s not expected to be that big.”

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The two broods emerging this year won’t overlap geographically, Skvarla said. “In a couple of Illinois counties, they’ll come close. Even then, they’ll be miles apart.”

So there is little chance that the two broods would interbreed and create a hybrid brood. Still, said Gene Kritsky, a biology professor at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati and author of a number of books and academic papers about cicadas, “There is a lot of interest to see whether they come in the same area and at the same time. They could hybridize. That said, you can’t really tell the broods apart. Cicadas are cicadas.”

The next large cicada emergence in Pennsylvania will be the eastern part of the state in 2030, Skvarla said. Another large brood will emerge in western Pennsylvania six years later.

The biggest brood – Brood X – is not set to return until 2038.

Columnist/reporter Mike Argento has been a York Daily Record staffer since 1982. Reach him at mike@ydr.com.

This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: Cicada apocalypse is coming this summer: Will Pa. be spared?