I remember when this article came out, my mom called me and said "you'll be okay, you're east of I-5, right?"
"Yeah mom."
About 6 blocks east. Plenty of cushion.
(From the tone of "About 6 blocks east. Plenty of cushion.", I'll guess that actual topographic maps don't give adamhi much cause for optimism.)
They've placed GPS sensors throuout the PNW and one of the more interesting things is that Oregon and Washingtons land is working in a spiral, and the land is moving in a circular pattern. Also that the hot spot that creates Yellowstone used to be off the Oregon coast and traveled through Oregon, and Idaho before it reached where it currently is. It's left a trail of calderas that they're only now discovering. The hotspot stays in the same spot, but the earths crust moves over it changing it's position over time.
I'm guessing this is why the Hawaiian islands look the way they do: a hotspot was underneath and formed volcanoes over time, which turned into the islands we now have, as the crust moved northwest.
The tsunami will be much more limited, and over quickly. Rebuilding so much cannot happen very fast.
The 300 year figure only applies to the southern Oregon and Northern California portion of the fault, and is based on turbidities and controversial.
Still, this is an under-appreciated risk of living in the northwest. There’s plenty of societies living in subduction zones across the planet. But few with as little awareness of their fault.
I remember talking to transplants to Seattle, I’d say there’s a 50/50 percent chance they were aware the region could produce earthquakes.
On the bright side: while we can never predict this for certain, it doesn’t appear there’s enough energy stored in the northern portion of the fault to produce a mega-thrust earthquake right now.
https://earthquaketrack.com/us-OH-Cleveland/biggest
4.5 / 23 years ago, 4.0 / 3 years ago, 3.7 /15 ..., 3.9 / 21...
Edit: s/thw/the/
Well that would be about every other time the southern end goes. In that case it's still overdue for the big one, but 270 years to go for the next very big one.
An absolutely nuts quote from the article -- "the northwest edge of the continent [...] will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west"
(With my mixed luck, the PNW mega-shark-quake-nami is just waiting for me to move back, so that'd really be irresponsible of me.)
8-)
There's no comparison to having nearly everything in multiple states obliterated to the point that rescue takes weeks or months to arrive. We're not equipped to instantly support millions of refugees in the US. Moving hundreds of thousands of people for Katrina was probably at the upper limit of what we can effectively do (for various definitions of "effectively"). A killer quake out west could have 10 million refugees.
Her hack job on Thoreau demonstrates this [0], in the selections of his writing that she reproduces and her at best inability to read his words (at worst willful misrepresentation them). It is easy to say that the “[Vision of Thoreau as a national conscience] cannot survive any serious reading of “Walden.”” It is much harder to know how to read Walden seriously.
But from a 'shareholder' perspective I expect the stock markets will go silly at the first sign of shaking.
… great point.
2.) someone have a child-version (but what about infants?). Not sure about you but putting my nephews into a jet pack seems like a poor idea, they're fidgety in car seats.
3.) It's a jet pack, and you're flying. How is that possibly safe without regular maintenance and training for what would be a once in 1000 year event?
Consider that the displaced water from this point event would radiate out in 360 degrees from the Canaries, dissipating with the square of distance traveled.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=us+east+coast+submarine+landslide
In theory tho, a well placed earthquake could bump those odds https://geology.com/noaa/atlantic-ocean-tsunami/
When it was published we were 29.6 percent past the 243 year average cycle time. Now we are more than 32 percent past. No, it's not a big difference but we are meaningfully further along than when it was written ;-)
I recall driving US-101 in Oregon some years back and kept seeing "Tsunami evacuation route" signs.
https://www.oregon.gov/oem/Documents/Tsunami_Evacuation_Sign...
On the bright side, you won't need a siren, If the ground drops by 10 meters over the course of 5 minutes and you can't stand up because of the shaking, you can be sure a tsunamui up to 30 meters high will be there in an hour or two.
The remark is clearly only intended to give an impression of the magnitude of the worst-case scenario.
Eruption-related lahars and sedimentation response downstream of Mount Hood: Field guide to volcaniclastic deposits along the Sandy River, Oregon -- https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/vsc/file_mngr/file-59/Pierson%20e...
> The Sandy River was originally named the Quicksand River by Lewis and Clark in 1805 (Moulton and Dunlay, 1990). Expedition members noted that the river (a) was ~275 m wide at its mouth and for several kilometers upstream on the delta (30-150 m wide there today); (b) had a number of mid Channel Islands; and (c) had flow which was turbid and very shallow (resembling the Platte River in Nebraska, they noted). It was given its name because "the bed of this stream is formed entirely of quick sand."
https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/old.2000/fs060-00/fs060-00.pdf
> What happened? The answer lay 50 miles away at Mount Hood. An eruption in the 1790's caused a tremendous amount of volcanic rock and sand to enter the Sandy River drainage. That sediment was still being flushed downstream when Lewis and Clark saw and named the river. Since 1806, the river has removed the excess sediment from its channel.
https://www.google.com/maps/@46.8814889,-124.1041651,3a,75y,...
They've changed them, though. They used to have a person climbing a hill as the wave comes chasing after them. Can't find a good example on image search. I found the old signs to be morbidly amusing. Like my spindly little legs are going to save me.
