An earthquake could destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest (2015)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one

by forrest2 • 4 years ago

121 90 4 years ago

forrest22• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megathrust_earthquake

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"

adamhi• 4 years ago

Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

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.

ripper1138• 4 years ago

Ha… it’s not like the earthquake will stop at I-5 like it’s a magic shield. If the quake knocks out utilities and services everywhere west of the cascades, this I-5 ‘line’ is meaningless.

kurthr• 4 years ago

Yes, but it won't be toast... it will be the hash and eggs that go with the toast!

verdverm2• 4 years ago

I believe they are referring to the tsunami that follows the earthquake, based on evidence from before the Europeans colonized the continent.

bell-cot• 4 years ago

True in some ways...but looking at a map of "% of population surviving the initial tsunami" would probably reveal a fuzzy north-south line. That'll be kinda important to FEMA.

(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.)

originalvichy• 4 years ago

That’s the joke.

thanatos519• 4 years ago

City blocks, or Minecraft blocks? :D

andrepd• 4 years ago

Aka metres x)

CapitalistCartr• 4 years ago

And you never venture West of it, right?

dieselgate• 4 years ago

This made me laugh as I'm about 2 blocks West of Hwy 5 in wa

zw1234562• 4 years ago

The article is from 2015

bee_rider4• 4 years ago

Only 293 years left :(

caycep• 4 years ago

eh...the timing is from that quake in 1700, tsunami from which devastated Edo Japan

zw1234562• 4 years ago

I like the comments, but I was just noting that the original post did not contain the requisite (2015) in the title, but I see that has been fixed now.

dont__panic• 4 years ago

Fortunately we've been geoengineering heavily since 2015. If we work hard enough, we can change the planet so much that "the big one" never arrives!

bitwize• 4 years ago

Don't get too comfortable if you're on the East Coast. Whatever survives sea level rise due to global heating, will be wiped out by the megatsunami caused by the ensuing landslide when La Palma erupts.

the_gipsy• 4 years ago

Isn't that theory from some total nutjob?

robin_reala• 4 years ago

No, but the consensus is that the intial modelling wasn’t accurate enough in several areas, which when updated leads to a much lower risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbre_Vieja_tsunami_hazard

mannykannot2• 4 years ago

It is not exactly a volcanic eruption that is the threat, but the collapse of the flank of the island (which might cause or be triggered by an eruption.) I believe Hawai'i presents a similar risk, and undersea avalanches (such as the prehistoric Storegga slides in the Norwegian Sea) pose a tsunami threat in many parts of the world not noted for their earthquake risk.

yosito• 4 years ago

Didn't La Palma erupt in the last two years?

WarOnPrivacy• 4 years ago

My East Coast tsunami money is on a submarine landslide. Long odds but what a payout.

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/

tcmart142• 4 years ago

With the way things are going, this might just get struck off the bingo card.

hanniabu• 4 years ago

https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/hvo/news/volcano-watch-ca...

driggs• 4 years ago

The volume of water displacement from a volcanic landslide is orders of magnitude less than that displaced by undersea fault quakes; while it could trigger a "local" tsunami that could impact the African or European coast, it would certainly not be in the same category as a "big one", nor very significant for North America.

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.

ChadNauseam• 4 years ago

What’s the bad news for chicago?

neilv• 4 years ago

The last several years, every time I consider the idea of someday moving back to Portland, I always think of this "The Big One" article.

(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.)

b3morales• 4 years ago

Are there not natural disaster risks everywhere? Floods, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes...

objectivetruth• 4 years ago

Floods, fires, tornadoes, and hurricanes only produce grave threats to the individual towns, cities, and maybe some multi-county regions that they cross. For individual incidents, we're relatively prepared beforehand and we know how to respond afterward.

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.

Blammar• 4 years ago

Except for an occasional mild snowstorm, Antarctica looks pretty safe (as long as you're upwind from Mt. Erebus.)

8-)

fullstackchris• 4 years ago

The northeast is pretty damn 'safe', as long as you can handle the occassional downed tree and subsequent power outage.

Archelaos• 4 years ago

Are there studies that analyse the effects of such an earthquake on the world's software infrastructure and thus on global economy?

fbanon• 4 years ago

Adtech will be devastated.

pixl97• 4 years ago

What is the bad news?

tcmart142• 4 years ago

How do I coax an earth quake into happening?

ece2• 4 years ago

In other news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32443017

forrest22• 4 years ago

Yeah this is what reminded me. Figured I'd revive the "mega earthquake" while the news was buzzing about the "mega flood".

ece2• 4 years ago

Might as well make it a trifecta: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/western-megadroug...

DrBazza3• 4 years ago

What is Microsoft's contingency plan for this? Or, in fact, the FAANG's and other west-coast tech companies? The effects of a Cascadia earthquake on the US and world economy would be "interesting".

philjohn• 4 years ago

I suppose it depends on data centre locations. Data centre on the west coast? I'd be wary, mostly central and east coast? Less of a worry.

sitkack2• 4 years ago

All the clouds will go down at the same time. The control planes for all them are heavily managed in Seattle.

DrBazza3• 4 years ago

From a cloud perspective, I'd hope everything just carries on.

But from a 'shareholder' perspective I expect the stock markets will go silly at the first sign of shaking.

digitallyfree• 4 years ago

Staffing would play a major role as well with their HQs on the west coast.

itza12• 4 years ago

It’s actually closer to every 500 years at the latitude Seattle and Portland are at.

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.

phkahler3• 4 years ago

> It’s actually closer to every 500 years at the latitude Seattle and Portland are at.

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.

Rediscover• 4 years ago

I transplanted to the PNW back in the 1990s, knowing well about the quakes. Previously I lived up & down the U.S. east coast and also NE Ohio. That latter gets small quakes, too, but mostly we thought it was an heavy vehicle driving by..

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/

xwowsersx2• 4 years ago

I think the year of publication of this article — 2015 — should be in the title, no?

bee_rider4• 4 years ago

It is not a big difference in geological time.

phkahler3• 4 years ago

> It is not a big difference in geological time.

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 ;-)

xwowsersx2• 4 years ago

haha true

toss1• 4 years ago

By the standards, of course, although considering that the topic is about events on a geologic timescale, a half a decade plus or minus doesn't change the relevance much ;-)

uberchet• 4 years ago

I remember reading this article when it came out. It's pretty terrifying.

aporetics• 4 years ago

It’s worth reading Ms Schultz’s other articles; if you do, you may come to the conclusion I did, which is that she is a very skilled provocateur, and always finds just that angle in whatever topic she is investigating.

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.

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/pond-scum

cronix2• 4 years ago

Nick Zentner of Central Washington University did a really good talk about this article and some of it seems overblown, specifically the "west of I5 will be toast."

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW4D6OE7Qkc

plipshevanel• 4 years ago

I stumbled across one of Nick's Volcano lectures on Youtube about a year ago and was unexpectedly captivated to watch the entire thing, which lasted about an hour! As someone who has always held an interest in Geology and Deep History, I really appreciate his efforts to make his University content available to the public.

cronix2• 4 years ago

Yes, I should have said more about the channel. If only we could all have teachers who are so enthusiastic and makes topics very interesting and easy to follow! All of his content is very good and captivating. If anyone is interested in pacific northwest geology, I'd highly recommend watching more of his stuff. He also has his own personal channel separate from CWU here and still making new content: https://www.youtube.com/user/GeologyNick

blueprint2• 4 years ago

I have seen many of his talks. that statement about west of i95 being toast is not incorrect. He made a very obvious point of the fact the energy released by this quake will be nearly 3 orders of magnitude greater than a 7. Coastline drops 30' and shifts 50'. 250 miles inland everything will move a foot still. do you have any idea how much fire, flooding, and death there will be?

midoridensha• 4 years ago

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.

ncmncm• 4 years ago

To me the big takeaway from the article was that it would take two years to restore electric power in much of the region.

The tsunami will be much more limited, and over quickly. Rebuilding so much cannot happen very fast.

gradschool• 4 years ago

I don't know how scientifically reliable this article is, but it gives me an idea. Could tsunami avoidance be an ideal use case for a jet pack? It doesn't need a lot of altitude or more than a few minutes of flight time, just easy rapid deployment without an airstrip. Some startup should be all over this. A combined package with an alarm triggered by an ultrasonic sensor would make a great sales pitch to well heeled customers living in that region. It might even lead to beneficial government policy changes by raising awareness of the danger when everybody who's not rich enough to afford one whinges about it on facebook.

cguess• 4 years ago

I'm not sure if this is satire? No, a jetpack is not an alternative for a tsunami. You'd have to: 1.) already be outside with it fueled and being worn. Tsunamis come quick if you're close enough to get seriously injured. If you're not then you just have time to get further inland.

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?

tablespoon• 4 years ago

I agree, because I really want to see some true-believer startup enthusiast going about their normal day with 100lbs of jetpack on their back, insisting it will be the next big thing.

phkahler3• 4 years ago

When that article was written, it was 29.6 percent past the average cycle time. Now it is more than 32 percent past. Time just keeps on marching forward. I didn't see any mention of what the distribution of intervals is, but 32 percent past average seems a lot even for a long-tailed distribution.

alsargent• 4 years ago

“The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.”

… great point.

An earthquake could destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest (2015)

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