Good morning, your death is surely nigh. DID YOU READ THE NEW YORKER THIS MORNING? NO? Keep in mind that The New Yorker actually does fact-checking, unlike, say, Harpers, which ran the 15 page AIDS denialist thing by Celia Farber! The New Yorker wants to save your LIFE. Let The New Yorker save your life! GET THE EVERLOVING FUCK OUT OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST WHILE YOU STILL CAN.
At this point, some of you are going to say “oh, we know! Everyone in the Pacific Northwest already knows about it!” NO. YOU DID NOT. YOU DID NOT KNOW HOW OVERDUE YOU ARE. OR HOW BAD IT’S GONNA BE. GET WOKE MY CHILDREN.
do not do this you’ll be upset:
Take your hands and hold them palms down, middle fingertips touching. Your right hand represents the North American tectonic plate, which bears on its back, among other things, our entire continent, from One World Trade Center to the Space Needle, in Seattle. Your left hand represents an oceanic plate called Juan de Fuca, ninety thousand square miles in size. The place where they meet is the Cascadia subduction zone. Now slide your left hand under your right one. That is what the Juan de Fuca plate is doing: slipping steadily beneath North America. When you try it, your right hand will slide up your left arm, as if you were pushing up your sleeve. That is what North America is not doing. It is stuck, wedged tight against the surface of the other plate.
definitely do not do this after you do the things in the last few paragraphs:
Flick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again. When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. (Watch what your fingertips do when you flatten your hand.) The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. 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.”
oh but surely it’s going to be so far in the future that only the Twilight vampires will be impacted?
In fact, the science is robust, and one of the chief scientists behind it is Chris Goldfinger. Thanks to work done by him and his colleagues, we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten. Even those numbers do not fully reflect the danger—or, more to the point, how unprepared the Pacific Northwest is to face it. The truly worrisome figures in this story are these: Thirty years ago, no one knew that the Cascadia subduction zone had ever produced a major earthquake. Forty-five years ago, no one even knew it existed.
I’M GONNA FOLLOW GOLDFINGER I’M GONNA WRAP MY LEGS AROUND HIM LIKE AN ALIEN CHESTBURSTER AND HE WILL SAVE ME
It is possible to quibble with that number. Recurrence intervals are averages, and averages are tricky: ten is the average of nine and eleven, but also of eighteen and two. It is not possible, however, to dispute the scale of the problem. The devastation in Japan in 2011 was the result of a discrepancy between what the best science predicted and what the region was prepared to withstand. The same will hold true in the Pacific Northwest—but here the discrepancy is enormous. “The science part is fun,” Goldfinger says. “And I love doing it. But the gap between what we know and what we should do about it is getting bigger and bigger, and the action really needs to turn to responding. Otherwise, we’re going to be hammered. I’ve been through one of these massive earthquakes in the most seismically prepared nation on earth. If that was Portland”—Goldfinger finished the sentence with a shake of his head before he finished it with words. “Let’s just say I would rather not be here.”
LISTEN FOR THE DOGS
The first sign that the Cascadia earthquake has begun will be a compressional wave, radiating outward from the fault line. Compressional waves are fast-moving, high-frequency waves, audible to dogs and certain other animals but experienced by humans only as a sudden jolt. They are not very harmful, but they are potentially very useful, since they travel fast enough to be detected by sensors thirty to ninety seconds ahead of other seismic waves.
WHAT WILL BECOME OF THE ELDERLY?
These lax safety policies guarantee that many people inside the inundation zone will not get out. Twenty-two per cent of Oregon’s coastal population is sixty-five or older. Twenty-nine per cent of the state’s population is disabled, and that figure rises in many coastal counties. “We can’t save them,” Kevin Cupples says. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it and say, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ll go around and check on the elderly.’ No. We won’t.” Nor will anyone save the tourists. Washington State Park properties within the inundation zone see an average of seventeen thousand and twenty-nine guests a day. Madin estimates that up to a hundred and fifty thousand people visit Oregon’s beaches on summer weekends. “Most of them won’t have a clue as to how to evacuate,” he says. “And the beaches are the hardest place to evacuate from.”
WHAT WILL BECOME OF THE CHILDREN?
Some of them, however, will not be able to do so. At an elementary school in the community of Gearhart, the children will be trapped. “They can’t make it out from that school,” Dougherty said. “They have no place to go.” On one side lies the ocean; on the other, a wide, roadless bog. When the tsunami comes, the only place to go in Gearhart is a small ridge just behind the school. At its tallest, it is forty-five feet high—lower than the expected wave in a full-margin earthquake. For now, the route to the ridge is marked by signs that say “Temporary Tsunami Assembly Area.” I asked Dougherty about the state’s long-range plan. “There is no long-range plan,” he said.
amaaaaaazing grace how sweeeet the sound that saved a wreeeetch like meeeeeeeeee
it is already too late for fred armisen and carrie brownstein but some of you may yet live if you leave now salt lake is beautiful please flee your deathtrap homes and schools i will embrace you i have hulu plus
Tags: advice, care, get right with god, jesus is real, love, no his mercy is endless you’ll be okay but you will probably feel better if you accept jesus before it all goes down, the new yorker, your imminent death
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i have been screaming internally since i started reading that article & i don’t know if i will ever stop
GUYS GUYS GUYSSSSS
Nicole, spending some time with Mallory doesn’t mean you have to pick up her weirder habits, like taking fables and making them awful —
Oh. Oh my God. It’s real.
I have always been pretty frightened of this which is why I don’t really regret leaving Seattle for the Netherlands
Ah yes, the natural response to fears of being swamped by the ocean is to LIVE BELOW SEA LEVEL.
Part of my incentive for moving back from Vancouver Island to the prairies was the fact that a geologist friend referred to my prairie hometown as being “geologically stable.” I can hide from a tornado, but not from an earthquake.
Well, now you’re going to drown so good luck with that.
I’ve moved from Portland to Eastern Europe and reading things like this wipes away any traces of regret that may surface.
Dammit! That’s my vacation spot!
Yeah I’m going to Seattle next month, I should be okay right?
oh man there go my dreams of moving to Seattle and summering in the San Juans
but ok Salt Lake City has been faintly calling my name, someone pitch me on it please
(ETA: I am out of New Yorker articles for the month, can someone tell me how needlessly alarmist this article actually is? My guess is “pretty” to “completely.”)
Well it’s alarming for sure, but I would quibble with the word “needlessly”: “Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle.”
AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH
Jesu Christo
Just a PSA if you open the link in incognito mode you can get around the “x number of article a month” limit.
Like if you mom only lets you have 3 cookies out of the jar a day, just go to buy your own.
As a Salt Lake City native, I can attest to its natural loveliness. Do celebrity endorsements count? Here’s one from that Modern Family dude: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/love-letters/a-love…
Well…here’s a video the Washington Department of Transportation made to explain why they needed to re-do the Seattle waterfront. Spoiler alert, bits of downtown fall into Puget Sound- and I believe this earthquake is of a much smaller magnitude than the one they’re talking about. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hos_uIKwC-c (The work they’ve been doing is supposed to keep that from happening, though)
Well, they pretty much solved homelessness, so there’s that. Plus there’s national parks!
The bond to build a school not in the inundation zone that failed because people don’t want their taxes going up even a little is such a testament to how messed up our society is.
That paragraph was the part where I just said, “fuck it, we’re doomed.”
Judging fom the description of the aftermath, they may be doing those kids a favor.
Oh man.
I’ve been dying to move to Seattle for over ten years and every bit of news like this just feels like the world is telling me I don’t belong.
Think About Scotland
oh, home bioregion. really harsh post to make me read on a Monday, Cliffe.
The horror of what is to come is too big for my brain on a Monday, so I’ll just leave this:
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLDDFINGERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
Poor Dr. Goldfinger. I cannot imagine what that must be like for him. I also have a ridiculous last name, but at least it’s a ridiculous last name that had had all its jokes told by first grade. Dr. Goldfinger will never not hear poor imitations of Shirley Bassey for the rest of his life.
You think he had it bad, you should talk to his roommate in college, Percy Galore.
LMAO! Best one all day.
Don’t forget this version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzJKYrvxPrQ
I believe the first lady would be very into singing that at this scientist.
Yeah no I’m in the middle of Station Eleven and I can’t handle more than one apocalypse scenario at once BYE
THIS IS REAL LIFE THAT IS A CHARMING NOVEL
I AM NEVER LEAVING THE BEAUTIFUL TREE-FILLED NON-QUAKING EARTH OF THE EAST (and Midwest to an extent) EVER AGAIN.
There’s a slight problem with this plan seeing how the east coast is going to be destroyed by global warming http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a36228/balla…
Let’s all move to Anchorage, I guess?
No good! Anchorage got walloped by the 2nd-worst earthquake in recorded history just 50 years ago.
Correcting for being far enough inland to avoid warming-related disaster, as well as away from plate boundaries and supervolcanoes, my best guess for the safest place to live in North America is approximately… nowhere. Perhaps in the sheltered, sheltered hills of West Virginia.
Well, I’ve just been looking at some maps, and West Virginia does look pretty good! Who wants to start a commune?
I grew up there! It’s beautiful, and I bet my parents would be totally fine hosting a Toast commune should the apocalypse hit.
Yeah, but then you get to worry about the whole coal company “mountaintop removal” thing…
Maybe if there’s a real-ass apocalypse we’ll be using so much less coal that the mountaintops will stay put?
Central Virginia. No coal, but roughly the same bedrock. I live near the Blue Ridge mountains, and when the Mineral earthquake hit a few years ago, it felt more like standing close to a train. People who were on the road at the time didn’t notice anything. The mountains also break up most of the particularly nasty weather before it can get to us.
All we’d have to worry about in WV is these guys: http://www.wowktv.com/story/29498109/two-inmates-…. Check out those identifying tattoos. (My West Virginian friend sent me that link and we’ve been snickering for days.)
I just about wet myself snickering at those tattoos
OH GOD I can’t open that article on my dinosaur work computer and now I am FREAKING OUT. How soon are we on the East Coast going to die? Will I be able to utilize my bug-out location that is only 10 feet above sea level?
On the plus side, we’ll lose Florida.
(runs away)
BOO TO YOU MADAM
-This Native Floridian
BLESS. I started in the Midwest, and jobs and life keep taking me East, and it’s like my subconscious is PROTECTING ME.
Everyone move to upstate New York! It’s cheap and we have lots of room! No massive earthquakes, no hurricanes, and access to fresh water!
Even winter is really fine, as long as you hire a snowplow service.
Yes, why oh why did I leave Syracuse? Nothing bad ever happens there (geologically speaking at least)
The is a small fault line way way up north along the St. Lawrence, and we did get occasional earthquakes when I was growing up, but they were teeny tiny ones that just lasted long enough to wake you up in the middle of the night and go “Huh? Oh, must have been an earthquake.” And then in school the next day you’d see who woke up and who slept through it.
ANNNNYways, I’m just biding my time before I can go back to upstate NY and live by a river or lake, enjoy non-humid summers and pay someone else to plow the driveway when it snows.
So, about the Midwest…
Grr, edited to have the link work. The essay is about the same New Madrid feature that alicia mentions immediately below, but with zesty writing and context about how seriously, profoundly hosed we’ll be when the NMSZ wakes up again.
It stops in Missouri. Only Southern Ohio and parts of Indiana and Illinois will feel that superquake. You can always hide in Milwaukee.
You’ll want to stay far away from St. Louis though.
We feel earthquakes down here in Ohio because of the fracking in Michigan!!!! Don’t be fooled!
Peter Watts, the World’s Most Depressing Sci-Fi Author, said he left Vancouver years ago cause he worked for the geologic survey team and thought a horrifying earthquake was just too inevitable to risk staying there.
Then again he also thinks in the future corporations will develop drugs to suppress empathy and and guilt and being a sociopath will become a requirement to employment.
I got to admit that I don’t find either scenario to be completely implausible.
Well, yeah, if you plan on working in upper management.
Yeah, I was going to say something along the lines of “being a sociopath already is a job requirement if your job is CEO of a major corporation.”
That’s ridiculous. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to roundup my best tweets mocking celebrities for my new social media internship.
I was reading a blog a while ago by structural geologist in Tofino, BC focusing on earthquake and tsunami awareness. One of her last posts on it is titled “You’re All Going To Die. (Whatever.)” where she says she’s leaving Tofino for Port Alberni since she sees no way Tofino will not become a horrifying death trap for everyone in the likely event of The Big One.
Wow, she is direct.
I’d take that hyperbole with a grain of salt, as Port Alberni is expected to be a highly likely location for a tsunami in even a modestly severe seismic event; its position would amplify the force of the wall of water up the harbour.
wait, how soon will these drugs be available? I could really use a break from my guilt
Samesies.
Well … he was correct on the latter … 😛
I think the drug and corporation thing is already a done deal, so two for two.
Northwesterners, prepare yourselves! Today you will receive at least three “[Mom] has sent you an article from the New Yorker” emails, with increasing degrees of panic & all-caps in their words. You may be tempted to ignore the warnings and think “Ok, I’ll read this later,” but beware: it will likely escalate to phone calls recommending you move someplace safe located suspiciously near your hometown. I recommend filling some gallon jugs of water in case she wants photographic proof.
What if my mom lives here too? I’m gonna get a lot of emails.
Grandma and the rest of the extended family will be emailing, I imagine.
My parents live in the suburbs to the east. Kirkland will be spared when Seattle is wiped out, because God has a cruel sense of humor.
Mine do too, and actually so do I, but I work in Seattle so I have about 1/3rd chance of sudden death. My parents are retired and they have a well, they’ll be fine.
My home and office both look out over the Sound. Work is only safer by about three blocks and one big ugly building in the way that *might* absorb some of the shock. But the building I work in was built in 1979, long before Seattle got serious about seismic regulations.
Your mom may also pre-emptively order you a giant disaster preparation kit from Amazon that will arrive tomorrow afternoon, but that’s okay because she loves you. Plus now you’re prepared.
My dad got all of use go-bags (that he put together himself) for Christmas a couple years ago.
You should submit this anecdote to Dad Magazine.
The Christmas Issue is probably FULL of “fun” gift ideas!
I am literally about to move to Portland in two weeks and I cannot IMAGINE how many people are about to try to dissuade me.
Yes, my GF and I are moving to Seattle in August. I just…sigh.
I already have mega seismic anxiety so I’m just going to bow out. After I drop this article about my town and how it’s hella racist and also we’re going to be killed by a giant mudflow when Mt Rainier goes. http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/for-tiny-o…
That sounds like the Orting I know and avoid.
Turns out if you want to farm, you have to move out of the city. 🙁 So here I am.
PS Do we know each other? I’m a librarian-adjacent PNW’er. UW iSchool MLIS class of 2005.
iSchool 2013! Born and raised in S King County, fled to Seattle ASAP.
Hi Lauren! <waves>, fancy meeting you here in the comments section relating to pretty much the scariest article I’ve ever read (in terms of things that have a high probability of impacting me and people I love in our lifetimes). Didn’t even notice it was you until I clicked on the link and was all, “Orting, Orting, why do I know that…? Oh!”
This was a New Yorker article that really really could have used a lot more maps and pictures. Maps of the region. Maps of where and how the destruction is going to occur.
Maps of all the cities and skylines filled with glass buildings that are going to SHATTER. I mean, LOOK AT VANCOUVER CONDOS THATARE JUST MAINLY GLASS.
I just found I-5 on the map and coloured everything west of it red. They say adult colouring is supposed to be relaxing…
I thought it was weird that the article didn’t address Vancouver at all. It said the disaster zone would be up to Canada, but I couldn’t tell if it was up to and including, and Vancouver is right over the arbitrary human-drawn border.
The Cascadia subduction zone veers west off the coast of Vancouver Island, which, in theory, means that the west coast of the Island will receive the brunt of the earthquake action. As for tsunamis, both Seattle and Vancouver will be significantly protected by the Strait of Juan De Fuca, which will limit the amount and force of the water that can force its way in through that relatively narrow passage.
So, aside from the deadly cascades of glass falling from all the high-rise condos, the liquefaction of the sandy soil under half of Greater Vancouver and the collapse of civil society that will inevitably follow, Vancouver will be okay.
Also, Canadian earthquake maps go completely blank below the border, so the indifference cuts both ways, I guess.
It’s the glass condos of Vancouver that haunt me.
I read an something the other day about Edmontonians the other day that their condos buildings aren’t all glass like Vancouver’s (because of the extreme cold of Edmonton weather) and it’s like “those Vancouver condos are death traps in the case of a natural disaster!!!”
I’ve heard that builders in Vancouver only use the really good, bendy glass, so those big ol’ panes just sway gently along with the rest of the building while the ground ripples underneath…
I can advise that being in a glass office building in an earthquake is a TRIP, as they do sway back and forth, and make you want to barf. But that was just a little bebe earthquake.
Yes, I’m in Vancouver.
If I buy earthquake insurance, I’m ok, right?
But…but… the San Juan Islands!
You’re all welcome. http://portlandtribune.com/sl/247224-112866-a-sne…
I kept thinking the same thing. I saved the article for a future nonfiction lesson and am hoping I can use it to stress how using visuals is import3.
I live on the east coast and this story makes me want to relocate to the top of a mountain.
let every city be a fortress, every home a bunker, no matter the fury that Nature wracks us with, we will endure
where are you gonna find a real mountain on the east coast, though
I will build one.
No fucking tsunami is going to get ME.
Especially as the East Coast sinks into the sea.
That’s a good plan on the East Coast, but here in the Pacific Northwest, our mountaintops have a tendency to explode.
Fucking hell, I just moved here.
SO DID I. (Whereabouts are you? I’m 20 minutes south of Porltand. On the wrong side of I-5, of course.)
(Nearish to the same place, from tthe sound if it. Shoot me an email at irisjuliawalker@gmail , maybe we can get brunch?)
Done!
Me too! I’m on the “right” side of I-5 by like… a block. But really they are all the wrong side unless you’re on the other side of the Willamette and can literally run for the hills.
SO DID I. Ugh, what have we done
Pfft, whatever, like the Yosemite supervolcano isn’t going to result in a mass extinction event first anyway.
Yellowstone
OK, so I’m sufficiently terrified, but did we really need to include this little gem?
“Goldfinger told me this in his lab at Oregon State, a low prefab building that a passing English major might reasonably mistake for the maintenance department.”
Unnecessary shade thrown.
I suspect it’s meant to demonstrate how few resources are being devoted to this subject.
Because English departments are always housed in palatial luxury.
so, correction: “…a passing football coach…”
So you’ve been to Corvallis…? Because, yeah. The only thing throwing shade is that HUGE stadium.
The author is probably an English major, right? So it’s self-deprecating. A little joke, haha, anyways this is how this situation will get even worse
I caught that, too, and was Much Annoyed.
Sooo New York to list past disasters and leave out the out the deadliest one in U.S. history because, y’know, who thinks about the flyover, especially Texas?
Can you elaborate? I just googled “texas earthquake” and various iterations of “deadly” but couldn’t find one with substantial fatalities. I had always thought the deadliest earthquake for us was the San Francisco shake in 1906.
1900 Galveston hurricane, if you want to somewhat-arbitrarily count only deaths occurring in the U.S.
You’re probably right if limited to earthquakes only, but the article includes Hurricane Sandy, presumably because even though the number of deaths was comparatively small, many of those deaths occurred in the obvious center of the universe.
Ah, ok. I can’t see the article so I didn’t realize it was including all natural disasters. Thanks.
I mean… it is the New Yorker.
Nicole, you know Salt Lake is also overdue for an earthquake, right? (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasatch_Fault)
They’re currently doing seismic retrofitting on my building, because they conducted a study and found that the stairs would collapse first, leaving us all trapped inside to wait for death. It keeps breaking the air con, which seems like a small price to pay for not dying most of the time.
Yes, this. All my life I have been told “not if but when” and “within the next 50 years” (so, within the next 25-ish now, although it doesn’t exactly work like that). The valley will liquify and I will laugh from up here on the bench, until the landslides or whatever get me.
I don’t know whether the lake is deep enough to have a tsunami, although Wikipedia, terrifyingly, has an article called “Tsunamis in lakes”, so it could happen.
OH BOY SUPER EXCITED TO MOVE TO PORTLAND AT THE END OF THE MONTH NOW
brb crying forever
Hey, there are lots of gastronomical and visual pleasures to soften the pain of our short lives, though. (Seriously, I just moved here in May! We should get together once you’re settled in.)
one of the things i am most looking forward to is a toast up in PDX, so DEFINITELY. also we don’t know anyone and we will need friends to try all the beers/food trucks/parks/etcetc with.
On the one hand: Welcome, and future-welcome-when-you-get-here! It’s lovely here, or at least it usually is, when we aren’t living through an unprecedented heat wave. (Ugh.) Or, you know, being inundated due to superquakes.
On the other hand: I am SO not a part of the craft/microbrew-beer and/or food-cart scenes, or I’d offer my services as a local guide. Really though, hit the giant food cart block next to the Galleria downtown, and then head toward the Pearl district to find the trendy pubs. You’ll do fine. 🙂
Take a pedicab. Ours was commanded by a woman wearing a white ballgown and a tiara who sang opera to us.
Portland toast up- yes please!
Nicole is not pleased with us:
maybe we want to meet up so we don’t die alone, nicole. did you think of that?
This tweet is the top reason I had to read this.
“FLY, YOU FOOLS!” – Gandalf and also me
Another Portland toaster here!
Woohoo! Is there an established Toast meetup you do? If not, I’m gathering emails now. Mine is writenaked AT gmail
(I defy your doomsday call, Nicole. I am going to ENJOY LIFE and fellow Toasties in the area until the last day arrives.)
There’s an existing Portland Hairpin Facebook group. Most of us are Toasties now too. https://www.facebook.com/groups/thehairpinportlan…
May your fire dancing under the bridges resonate with the intoxication of your drum circle
Awesome! You can email me at writenaked AT gmail.
Sounds like you could use the Toast Connections doc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_26MiL9WN…
Yo, I am also moving to PDX at the end of the month, let’s meet up and craft a disaster plan
Hi people who live here now or will live here soon! I mostly lurk on the Toast, but I wanted you all to know we have volunteer disaster preparedness teams called “NETs” (neighborhood emergency teams) and we have plans, and emergency kits, and monthly meetings and lots of fun stuff. I help a local team with training events, and even got a ham license so I could communicate with the fire dept and we even got our emergency planning dept at the city to put a little more budget into our program .., actually this article was even depressing to me and I already know all this stuff but really if you are having a meetup pls let me know so I can recruit you all. Anna underscore in underscore pdx at live dot com
BUT IF WE MOVE EASTWARD THEN WE’RE CLOSER TO THE SUPER VOLCANO THAT IS YELLOWSTONE.
Oh, haha, don’t worry about that. If the supervolcano erupts in Yellowstone, the entire continent would be blanketed with ash. Literally nowhere is safe from it!
THAT IS TRUE WE ARE ALL DOOMED NOTHING MATTERS LET’S ALL GET DRUNK ON A MONDAY MORNING
Perhaps it is the only surety the temporal world has to offer us.
SHUT UP, NICOLE, I JUST GOT HERE.
Honestly, though, I’m not going back to Houston. If I’m going to die here, so be it. At least I’ll have the memory of really fucking awesome trees and mountains in my last thoughts before it all goes black. Better that than returning to peter out my days in Houston. That was actually one of my motivators to leave my place of residence after 20 years: I don’t want to die here.
“Death Before Houston” is a perfectly legitimate life motto.
I was just thinking the same, “what else am I gonna do, move home? nope.”
EXACTLY. We know exactly the value of our choice.
This was a pleasant Monday morning read here in Seattle. Also, this kind of thing (and Yellowstone) is why we need space travel / colonies.
I would soooo much rather die on Earth than in space, though. At least it’s familiar instead of cold and black and empty.
Having recently read Seveneves you’re not wrong. But someone else can go 🙂
I have spent huge chunks of idle time in the months since I saw Insterstellar thinking about how bad things would have to get before I would agree to take to space (SO BAD, I don’t like being in places that are unsurvivable)
IDK I read that Esquire piece about climate scientists over the weekend (OK actually I read part of it and then got too sad to read the rest) and I’m so depressed about the fact that it’s too late to save the Earth that I feel basically nothing about the near-term destruction of Seattle.
Mayyyybe this is a feeling I need to deal with.
I definitely had a similar response upon reading the article – Seattle might be destroyed sooner than the rest of the world, but we’re all headed there. I made a no-climate-change stories before bed rule, but it doesn’t actually help. Nicole, we should ALL fly, but there is nowhere to fly to. MARS DOESN’T COUNT, ELON.
Yuuuuuuuuuuup. I’ve made a “no reading sea ice papers until you finish your thesis” rule (my thesis does not deal with sea ice at all) — they are so dire and the time scales are SO SHORT 🙁
Oh my goodness, I read that and just sat dejectedly in hopelessness. And then I realized if I’m getting out of academic science, maybe I can be an alarmist we so desperately need? But man, it amplified my “I feel like I’m holding a fan against a hurricane” sentiment something awful. 🙁
Honestly if someone called me up and said “quit your PhD program, we have to go be climate revolutionaries, it’s probably illegal, don’t ask questions” right now I would maybe sign up. I am in A State.
Ugh, me too, and I only have a few months left (with any luck). :/
I vote volcano over tsunami. Crispy oblivion, that’s my plan. Might need to move westward…
If you want crispy oblivion, I think you need to be fairly close to the volcano! Slowly starving to death after the ash kills all the plants is probably a much less pleasant way to go…
Well, whatever happens, I do NOT want to suffocate on toxic fumes like the people of Pompeii.
According to the FAQ page on the USGS website, an eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano is unlikely in the next “thousand or even 10,000 years.”
It sounds like we should be a hair more worried about the PNW. The thought of the daycare centers and school in the inundation zone fill me with horror.
YES, SAME! Yellowstone is certainly devastating in a broader and more dramatic way, but I have never read anything that gives anything close to the kind of timeframe we’re looking at here.
hahahaha! I live in Victoria, BC! Two blocks from the ocean! Below sea level! On the map of areas affected by tsunami, our house is in the bright red zone! <screaming forever>
Perhaps I will go start a new life in Alberta. I hear people actually make money there.
I think it’s just wall-to-wall wildfires over there right now, though.
Tree-to-tree?
My bets would be on Ottawa for safest city from natural disasters.
Ugh, I loathe Ottawa. (More due to ~issues in my personal life~ when I was living there than anything about the city, although it is intolerable in both summer and winter.)
Yes, the summers are hot, and the winters are freezing, but it’s far enough away from tornadoes, fault lines, oceans, and invading American armies to be relatively safe. Forest fires might be an issue.
Could we be okay in the NWT?
Bugs! And thawing permafrost!
Hey, we have bugs galore AND we have eight months of cold, damp winter weather (as low as 40 below zero) in the Ottawa area. Get me outta this place! Such a horrid place to die.
Yeah, anything along the Toronto-Montreal corridor is probably okay, though there are more tornados in Southern Ontario than there are farther up. I’d take terrible winters instead of a geological sword of Damocles every day of the week.
I just deleted a post where I said, “Well, at least I’m not in Victoria!” (Sorry – it’s just that Victoria has a few interesting fault lines running right under downtown)
But you can always throw your hands in the air and shout, “Whoo – at least I’m not in Tofino!
Or Port Renfrew…
My instagram feed is clogged with photos of people enjoying their summers in Tofino.
This article makes me slightly less jealous.
Yes – they have all these signs along the ocean road that say, “Tsunami Escape Route”, with a little figure just booking it away from a giant wave. it’s a lie – there’s no escape if the whole friggin’ Pacific Ocean decides to pay a visit.
I’m in Victoria, too! I’ll think of you when we meet our untimely demise.
One can only hope for a swift and painless death.
But, Victoria is so lovely, each house nestled in a crook of land and sea, more lovely than the last.
Seattle has several of my ethnic-snob, intolerant relatives and I kinda want to point the wave that way (and the rest of you will float above it on inflatable pool toys) but, Victoria is lovely.
I truly unironically love how the New Yorker does not deign to include any maps or nifty animations of the deathquake, and instead invites readers to perform a bizarre hand dance to understand seismic subduction zones.
Imagine how many people are doing this hand dance today! I almost did it in a crowded classroom just now, and then bashfully stopped because I was sure everyone would know I was thinking about the Juan de Fuca plate!
Not to mention their adorable refusal to stoop to numerals. In a science article. For crying out loud, even the Chicago Manual of Style lets you use numerals for numbers larger than 100.
I’m imagining an editor in tears forcing this piece into the New Yorker style guide.
I bet the same editor came up with the hand dance too; “I know you won’t let us put in any helpful illustrations or pictures, but we’ve got to find a way to help readers visualize this!”
I’m a geologist from Seattle and this was one of the things that disappointed me about the article, as “everything west of I5” is a gross overestimation and nice little geology cartoons could do wonders to illuminate this material. Both SEA and PDX are sheltered from the full intensity of tsunami by not directly abutting the Pacific – some of the energy will dissipate as the water makes its way thru regional inlets. SEA’s bigger concern is liquefaction, and depending on how much rain we’ve had when a big quake hits it has the potential to be an issue for huge swaths of the region. Tho it does fill my tiny little dark heart with delight to know that its largely our wealthiest neighborhoods that are built on soggy unstable cliffsides, suckers.
Given that PDX has been thru fewer recent ice ages I suspect they’ve got more stable ground to build on, but can’t speak to this with any expertise. Any Portland geologists here to chime in?
I’m not a geologist, but from what I’ve seen on the maps, they’re predicting Portland’s airport and parts of downtown, mostly the places along either of the two rivers. The real danger zone for liquefaction seems to be further south and west in the suburbs. http://www.oregongeology.org/hazvu/
Yes, toodles to the Magnolia Bridge in Seattle. PDX was a royal mess when the Willamette rose back in the -70’s? And then they built back along lots of it. It’s lovely but, dudes. Do you have enough sandbags?
“one of the chief scientists behind it is Chris Goldfinger”
♫ Gold-FINGAHHHHHHHHH ♫
He’s the man, the man with a PhD in Structural Geology from Oregon State University
(sorry)
this is so good
“We can’t save them,” Kevin Cupples says. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it and say, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ll go around and check on the elderly.’ No. We won’t.”
#TeamCupples
sorry everyone this is the kind of dry humor and ruthless practicality that will fortify my east coast prepper bunker. see you on the other side of the shattered ruins of our civilization!!!!!
This is pretty much exactly why I live in flyover country. All I have to do is run to the basement now and then to dodge the occasional tornado. No earthquakes, no coastline to rise, plenty of water table left. Not gonna like it when it’s 5 degrees warmer in the summer, but AT LEAST I WON’T BE DEAD OF A HORRIFYING EARTHQUAKE/TSUPERNAMI.
I fucking love living in the Northern Plains. Literally as far away from an ocean as I can get and still be in North America. Now, if my Washington relatives would follow suit already, I’d be overjoyed.
Meh, you gotta die of something.
Yeah, but it doesn’t have to be a tsunami.
Sure, but it’s going to be something. No mater where you go. Death finds us all.
We’ll see about that.
Yeah, but when you’re a little kid? At a school built in the wrong place because the asshole adults who are supposed to be caring for you wouldn’t cough up an extra two dollars on their taxes?
Well, of course. But I’m only talking about me and my own inevitable drop into the void.
Yeah, but you know what they say: I’d rather go peacefully in my sleep like Grandpa, not screaming in terror like his bus passengers.
(literally the same reply I have used for every single person who tagged me this story on FB)
I read this as “Men, you gotta die of something” and thought, yes indeed.
also i highly recommend this book from the io9 science editor annalee newitz, all about the earth’s previous mass extinctions and how the global ecosystem bounced back from each one. basically: YES, WE ARE GOING TO DIE, but earth will probably continue without us and that’s really the best outcome.
the best outcome for the earth, i mean. she’s probably better off without us. the next system of conscious multicellular life will find our ruined corpses in the earth and maybe they’ll learn something before they discover our carbon-rich bodies make a decent fuel source.
THIS.
I mean, really. I hope the next dominant species doesn’t fuck everything up as badly as we have.
<3 <3 <3 <3 <3
Yeah, pretty much humans are a cancer on the earth and half of me is rooting for the earth to shrug us off and then be like “aaaaahhhhhh that’s so much better.”
I, for one, welcome our extremophile unicellular successors.
I know this was like most of a year ago, but it ended up on the Link Round-Up today and I saw your comment.
This kind of thing makes me wish I believed in ghosts because I would LOVE to just haunt the future and *find out what happens*.
I think I read to many novels: “But what happens neeeext?”
TALK ABOUT SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE AMIRITE
Bad traffic and constant threat of death by natural disaster is the price to pay for our beautiful vistas.
Heh, I came from a place where the traffic is far worse (Houston), so I count my bargain awesome.
This is why I live in the Midwest. All I have to deal with are blizzards and tornadoes. Those are peanuts compared to hurricanes and earthquakes and massive wildfires that eat up half the state. Y’all have fun with that.
Yeah? How’s that Ogallala aquifer doing? Y’all got enough irrigation water to keep the next Dust Bowl from happening?
I enjoy all the regional shade being thrown here.
I’m trying to think up a good one to burn Utica, NY…
Depending on what part of the Midwest you are in, you might have to worry about the New Madrid seismic zone. http://www.idlewords.com/2015/07/confronting_new_…
What hurricanes? Seattle does not get hurricanes.
Having been to the earthquake museum in Christchurch (and just Christchurch in 2007 vs 2014) I’m really surprised it wasn’t referenced in the article, even though tsunamis weren’t really an issue there. Just horrifically unprepared structures and GROUND LIQUEFICATION which is up there as far as least favorite word pairings.__But god I love plate tectonics when they’re not going to kill us all.
“GROUND LIQUEFICATION”
I did not know that this was A Thing, but…. holy crap, that sounds terrifying.
I think it’s also a problem in Mexico City since it was built on a lakebed and it’s all soft sand and rocks that offer nothing in the form of resistance to those waves! woooooo
The director of our city emergency mgmt dept did a big slideshow about Christchurch because it’s situation is very similar to portland’s. It was terrifying!
If you want to NERD OUT on this and read about the people trying to put together an early-warning system, I recommend joining the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network Facebook group. It’s also a refreshing source of fairly regular science-y snark.
Does anyone really want warning of this? “You’re going to die in ten minutes, so enjoy that caramel macchiato.”
Yup -thirty to ninety seconds? What can you do with that except scream? No shelter you could possibly run to can save you from half the fucking ocean dropping on your head.
I guess, if I have to go, I wouldn’t mind dying suddenly while (say) eating a croissant and reading Toast comments. I’d definitely rather not know it was coming!
Why do you think that we in Cascadia have spent the last fifteen years perfecting the art of everything? We know full well that the earth will swallow us soon. Might as well go down with a a cup of amazing coffee in your hand. Carpe diem!
amen
I came onto The Toast to top up my misandry after discovering that my gym has moved all the machines around so that the gym bros who populate the place get even more room to look at their muscles in the mirror, thereby making a place even more inhospitable for women, but it’s looking pretty good now compared to the tsunami-volcano deathtrap that is America! Thanks, Nicole!
ugh I’m imagining running on a treadmill in front of a mirror now and being forced to look at my shirt riding up and my shitty cheap sports bra doing a shitty cheap job of holding everything in and just uuuugghhhhhh
This is why I live in Vermont. In the mountains. With easy access to farms.
I can survive the Winter. I can survive the Tourists. I can survive What Comes Next.
I will survive it all.
But what about Old Henry?
http://the-toast.net/2015/07/02/a-letter-from-chr…
And what else did you think the What Comes Next is?
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. We will ride out the apocalypse with ample supplies of cheese and pancakes with maple syrup.
Yesssss. We are New England, and we are… huh, according to this climate change report we may not be suitable for maple syrup production in the future.
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/impacts-adaptati…
Well, other than that, we’ll be fine, right?
My apartment has a view of the Sound from the west side of 1st Ave. I will get to watch my horrifying death rolling in through the sunset. Thanks, Nicole. Thanks, so much.
I grew up on one of the biggest faults in California, and when I say “on,” I mean “about a half-mile from.” After a while, you get inured to this kind of carrying-on. Ain’t nothing scares me, but that’s because I live in New Mexico now.
I lived about the same distance from the Hayward fault when I was stationed in the Bay Area.
I’ve lived within a couple dozen miles of one or another fault my whole life and yeah, I’m finding it hard to get worked up about this. People are always saying earthquakes are gonna kill everyone and destroy everything we hold dear, but it actually seems like the people who really have stuff to worry about are the people in flood zones over on the East coast.
Which is why they instead spend their time worrying about earthquakes, as do the people hanging out in hurricane-prone areas. Me, I just worry about centuries-long droughts, because that’s relevant to my immediate surroundings but also about 600 years in the past.
The New Yorker had that article a while ago about how everyone in New Mexico was going to die of valley fever, so they’ve got you covered too, no worries.
The part of CA I grew up in was also valley fever central (the Central Valley), and my mom actually contracted it a few years ago. Freaked me out to no end, but she’s fine now.
Quite the exciting areas you choose to live in! I’m glad your mom is okay! (Of course, I also associate New Mexico with that one road trip where we were low on gas and the GPS had stopped working and we didn’t have a road atlas in the car so I had no idea if we were going to make it to the next gas station, so there’s a general doom ambiance for me & New Mexico…)
Yes, but we’ll also supposedly have the best place to live during climate change!
I’m married to a structural engineer, and we live in Portland. A LOT of buildings in PDX have being retrofitted with bracing in the event of seismic activity, and the building codes are as stringent, if not more, than the codes for the state of California.
That said, we are house shopping, and the split-level on the east side of I-5 looks a bit better than before.
Come to the east side! We have places that are not liquefaction zones!
Don’t worry, guys, President Trump is never gonna let that Juan de Fuca guy crash our borders.
Oh, man, I wish someone would ask him, “Mr. Trump, what do you think about Juan de Fuca?” and then just sit back and hit “record.”
SOMEONE DO THIS OMG.
It’s like when Peter Kent got asked about the ozone layer a few years ago and it was so terrible and so delicious.
Juan de Fuca is a perfect name of course. It’s like how my father in law would euphemize WTF.
“Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”
*wipes brow* good thing I live in cap hill.
When I moved to Seattle, someone told me that the Sound protects us from tsunamis. I have no idea if that’s true but I choose to believe it (while simultaneously being smug about the fact that I live on a hill).
my INTENSE MORNING GOOGLING says that’s probably true! so we’ll drown in a sea of liquefied concrete in one of the thirty-thousand landslides instead. way nicer.
I’ll wave to you from my window on the 30th floor of a 50-story office building as we sink!
When I moved to Seattle, a friendly bank teller told me not to worry, when Mt Rainier explodes it’ll wipe out Tacoma but Seattle will be fine.
EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE FINE YOU GUYS
Yeah, it’ll be great island living after the quake! But you probably won’t have a boat to get any supplies.
ok, I’ll leave if I can come live with you
as someone who is currently living in Seattle right now, my only question is: can this thing happen before I take the Bar? Or result in an automatic pass.
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, it’s surprising how accepting you become of the idea that your town will soon become a geological killing zone. I remember being a kid in elementary school and doing constant earthquake drills that including the advice that “When you exit the building, run as fast as you can for the fence, since the slate roof tiles will be sliding off and if one hits you you will be dead.” Ok guys, thanks! On the plus side, during the one earthquake we had in high school, everyone hit the floor really fast.
Also, my grandfather went through a tsunami in his tugboat and said it wasn’t so bad. Maybe everyone should live on boats from now on.
I am here for a postapocalyptic civilization where we all live on boats, but this is partly because I have always wanted an excuse to dress like a pirate in my daily life.
As long as you’re not too close to shore, I’m guessing a boat *would* be the safest place to be during a tsunami, since you’d just go up and down vertically as the wave rolls under you.
You are correct! Any time we have a tsunami warning here (once or twice a year) everyone with a boat has to take them out to deep water to ride it out.
Yeah, that’s what he said. He just went waaaaayy up and then waaaayy down. The largest tsunami ever recorded was safely rode out by two boats, although the third boat was destroyed when they tried to outrun the wave. (Was anyone else fascinated by The Wave? I WAS)
Agreed! We had an earthquake drill in our office recently, and I won a Starbucks card and a certificate for kicking ass in it. I grew up here, it’s muscle memory.
That was an interesting, but incredibly sobering article. The real irony was that I was considering relocating to the Pacific Northwest myself, but now… Let’s just say I’m backing away slowly. I currently live in “flyover country”, where tornadoes and hail are tracked to within an inch of their lives- so I don’t worry about them. Nor do I worry about living near the New Madrid Seismic Zone, because unlike folks in Washington or Oregon, my state has been retrofitting buildings and infrastructure in that area.
I lived in Japan as a kid, and California as a young adult, so I’ve been through a few earthquakes. And I felt the 4.3 jolt that ended fracking in Arkansas. To Californians, that was a dish rattler, but it really scared us.
No place is truly safe. The weather is getting crazier every year out here, with baseball sized hail becoming more common. But even things like that are heavily localized. Within a mile, you can go from a disaster movie scene to Normal Land after a tornado. If the West Coast gets wiped out, it’s going to be nuts out there for decades. So, when people ask me why I live out here, I just tell them it’s the lesser of most evils.
I think about The Big One every time I drive south on the Viaduct in Seattle. I will be dead, but I will have gotten home 45 minutes faster than any other option….
Same: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hos_uIKwC-c
I *never* drive on the viaduct. I grew up in Northern California and saw much footage of the Cypress Street Viaduct that collapsed in the ’89 Loma Prieta Earthquake. And I bet that one was more structurally sound than ours.
I am petrified of the viaduct for that very reason.
saaaaame
Meh. I live east of I-5. I’ll be fine.
People who grew up in the Willamette Valley know this because of the “Spring Break Quake” of 93. That was when we all started earthquake drills.
Here I was feeling whiny and bored in the Midwest and wanting to move to San Fran but you know what? I’m good.
Please don’t circulate the memo around Amazon campus.
Or do, so they’ll GO AWAY. (…I mean, yay economic development)
Watching the campus drown in lava sounds so much more satisfying tho.
Reading the GQ article about climate scientists, watching Interstellar, and then reading this all in the span of 3 days is apparently super-great for my mental health. BRB, researching how to buy property in Vermont.
Just make sure you have all your shots first.
Oh, I do. I even have some extra weird ones, thanks to lots of travel to questionable places.
Be prepared for crazy taxes. And Old Henry. And taxes paid to Old Henry. He demands his tithe, he does.
And not necessarily in money… (shudders)
Buffalo welcomes you with its plentiful water, lack of violent weather, local agriculture, and cheap housing.
Except for the occasional freak 7 foot snowstorms. Sorry. No place is perfect. Live north of the snowbelt and you’ll be fine.
(waves from Rochester)
(Waves back) Rochester is another excellent option! Beginning of September I will be there once a week for one final year. I like it…Highland Park and the Tap and Mallet and Starry Nights and Dickie’s and Equal Grounds. Good times.
Excellent! There’s a lot of good stuff here these days (especially restaurant-wise).
Incidentally, I’m always up for an Upstate NY Toastie meetup, if anyone’s interested.
I am so there. I will be in Rachacha Tuesdays and Wednesdays starting first week of Sept, staying in and around South Wedge.
Woohoo! I have a pretty flexible work schedule, so I’d be happy to meet you for breakfast or lunch in the South Wedge sometime. (The South Wedge Diner is my home away from home, and there are also some interesting places along South Ave.)
Hey! I’m in Rochester too! So nice to find a fellow Toastie so close 🙂
And yes, WNY is supposedly the best for Impending Disaster Avoidance. I’ll take a ton of snow over angry tectonic plates any day of the week.
Yay! 🙂 I second all of that.
Yay another nearby Toastie!!!
Want to do a meet up sometime? Maybe we could set up a Gmail address?
Yes! Let’s definitely do a meetup. I know of at least one other Rochester Toastie, archivesjulia, and I’m positive she would love to meet up as well. Let me know! We could definitely make sure to get together when JGlows is in town.
Awesome!
I know there are a few central NY folks here, too. Maybe we can do a post in the Open Thread on Friday and see if any of them are up for a drive?
Great! Oh yay I’m excited! Would you like to post or would you want me to? (I’m happy either way!)
You can go ahead, if you like– I’m not the world’s greatest organizer, but I’m happy to help!
Ok fantastic. I’ll be sure to post on Friday. 🙂
Not so sure about Vermont. I live in New Hampshire, right next door, and we do have small quakes here, regularly. Not The Big One, but big enough to knock over bookcases and cause ceiling tiles to fall down. Also blizzards, tornadoes, and the occasional hurricane. And I’m not sure I live far enough from the coast to avoid climate change flooding. NH only has 3 miles of coastline, but that’s just a geopolitical fiction– the coast is still there, it’s just part of Massachusetts and Maine.
Oddly enough, it kind of looks like the earthquakes are obeying the Vermont- New Hampshire border:
La la la la la, I can’t hear you.
Washington lifer here currently living in Edmonds.
My husband and I were living in Japan in 1995. One winter morning, we were woken by a distant but powerful earthquake – the whole building was swaying, the dishes were clinking, something fell over with a bang – the first thing I said was, “Well, there goes Tokyo.”
Everyone knew that Tokyo was overdue for a huge earthquake – so many fault lines run under that city, it’s like a Fabergé egg perched on top of a stack of shattered dinner plates.
We turned on the TV, expecting to see footage of the ruins of Tokyo – and saw, instead, the ruins of Kobe. Nobody predicted it, nobody expected it – everyone was so busy worrying about the deep faults under Tokyo that they overlooked the shallow fault that ran right beside Kobe.
So yes, the Cascadia Subduction Zone could go off at any time – but so could something else, some unexplored fault that takes everyone by surprise, somewhere not here.
I have to believe that, because otherwise I’d be worried all the time, instead of the currently acceptable 47% of the time that I worry now.
This was oddly calming. Thank you.
Someone point me to where I can research how bad this quake will be by the time it gets to the eastern side of Washington. I want to think that the Cascades will act like a person standing on a wiggling jump-rope and dampen the effects, but earthquakes are crafty, sneaky bastards that know how to get around boring mundanities like giant freaking mountains.
I think your problem might be refugees.
I did actually know about this, but then again I work at a structural engineering firm so we’ve been burning the midnight-total-apocalypse oil for a bit now. We’re all doomed forever, I’ve accepted my fate.
I knew about it too, just from following article links first after a benign but scary 4.4 where I used to live (you really feel it in a trailer) and then after the Napa quake last year. I have a tiny bugout bag, but my real plan is just to open a tiny parasol like Wile E. Coyote and let the anvils fall where they may.
Is it weird that Tom Lehrer keeps playing in my head when I read these articles? I know I should be freaking out, but all I can think of is “We Will All Go Together When We Go.” 0___0
That’s my favorite of his! So catchy. (“You will all go directly to your respective Valhallas, go directly, do not pass ‘Go’, do not collect two hundred dollaaaahhhs”)
I guess this really isn’t *so* bad, if you’re of a generation where you expected to be obliterated any day by nuclear warfare…
Another Tom Lehrer fan! For me, favorite song is a tie between “Masochism Tango” and, of course, the aforementioned apocalypse pub song. 😀
I wasn’t try to say that the current situation isn’t bad! Honestly, I think it’s a little worse, because I feel like we have more control in whether or not a nuke drops? I don’t think anyone actually wants a nuclear apocalypse, you know? Whereas with natural disasters and extreme temperature situations, our opportunity to control has passed, if there even was an opportunity (thinking about the possibility of earthquakes here, not climate change).
Yeah, I was born in 1980, and I wasn’t really all *that* worried about the bomb. The whole “mutually assured destruction” thing seemed to make that kind of unlikely.
I try not to think too much about climate stuff, because, really, it probably is too late to do anything. (cracks open another bottle of riesling)
I’d much rather die in the PNW than live anywhere else.
This is just a ploy to keep people from moving to Seattle. Or maybe it’s too late for that.
I hope. Like I was hoping Rachel Dolezal was just a ploy to keep people from moving to Spokane WHICH IS A REALLY AWESOME SMALL CITY WITH CHEAP RENT BTW BUT IT’S A SECRET SO DON’T TELL ANYONE.
Confidential to Toasties: this whole thing is just what we tell Californians so they don’t move here and further hike our rent.
lol why would we move there brook
It’s the best place… Wait, I mean it’s the worst. Don’t move here. It rains all day, every day. There are no roads, they are all food cart parking now.
Been there. Done that. Ditched y’all and your Cascadia bullshit for Los Angeles.
…And the worst drought in history.
Um. Could you send some of that tsunami and rain stuff our way? Please?
Please please please let this information lower the rent prices in Portland.
From your typing fingers to God’s ears
I am sure I read a very similar article within the past couple of years. Fewer authority quotes, but essentially the same content. Hm.
I have spent most of the afternoon wallowing in a panic attack, because most of my family/friends live right where everything will be swallowed up. Growing up in the Northwest, there was that that constant threat/education of, “earthquakes! volcanoes! They will get you.” And there was a lot of education about our surrounding environment. (which was great) But it seems more terrifying now that I live far away. “OMG FAMILY LEAVE NOW!”
I am going to lay down and watch British people murdering each other on tv in a nice civilized sort of way.
Right… so let me ensure I understand this. It’s better to move to SLC where I’m closer to Yellowstone (aka The Super volcano) than it is to stay where I’m at?
people think i’m nuts to not wanna leave PHX ’cause we’re all supposedly gonna die of drought but i tell ’em i’m holding out ’til california falls off and i’ve got myself some ocean front property. so… that’s gonna happen for real i guess.
CRIKEY i read this at work initially convincing myself that it was on-task, and the next thing i knew i was doing weird things with my hands, and then i was making gasping horrified noises oh wait i’m still doing that
*geologic cackling*
I’ve been reading about the Cascadia subduction zone for ages and its probably one of the top faults I want to study once I am a big grown up geologist with a PHd and things. I’m kinda delighted that other people know about it now!
I’m on my phone since I’m on vacation right now, so I can’t pull up any geologic stuff on the fault, but I’ll be back by Friday so if anyone wants me to talk about the stuff I know about the fault/earthquakes in general I’d be willing to do that in the open thread.
“if anyone wants me to talk about the stuff I know about the fault/earthquakes in general” YES, OBVIOUSLY. 🙂
Heck yeah!
I was waiting for my geologists to show up, thank! See you Friday and we can bounce some things back and forth. 😛
If you’re going to move away because you’re afraid of massive earthquake, don’t move to Salt Lake. We have a little something called the “Wasatch Fault…”
I moved here last summer… to escape Boston’s overdue fault line. ffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
I can only assume that this was why my mother had me read “The Big Wave” so many times as a child. She knew. She knew we were doomed. Accepting it is cheaper than moving.
We had a 4.5 earthquake in Eugene, Oregon, just last week. I was lying in bed, and my first response was to do my usual checklist when I feel the bed shake: “Washer? Dryer? Quake? Crap. Quake!”
Everyone was fine, no damage in our extremely structurally unsafe house, cats zoning out in the backyard. I felt a lot better when I saw they weren’t running around and freaking out.
So I’ve been planning a trip to LA and the Pacific Northwest with my kids next year (from Australia) and now I’m finding out I’ll be leading my babies into CERTAIN DEATH??
You should totally come! The LA weather is sooo stangely perfect right now!
Oh great we’re elderly and just retired to Vancouver Island. At least we’re at the top of a hill but less than 10 blocks from Williows Beach. Oh well, it’s been an interesting life.
This is why the house I bought on Vancouver Island is 86 meters above sea level and on the east side of the island (less likely to be affected by tsunami). After reading this article though, I’m going to look into seismic upgrades on the house.
i live in seattle, this scares the crap out of me, ive heard this for years now
But where am I supposed to gooooooooooooo. I can’t go back to Wyoming because the caldera is going to blow and I can’t go to Texas because it sucks.
Yes, that’s the sucks and blows joke, but it was inadvertent. Caldera really is going to blow. Or it’s going to dry up. Depends on who you ask.
Twilight town is goin down when the big one hits. Ocean, three rivers and all these mountains around me. I rather be bitten by a vampire or a LaPush werewolf. Oh the Cullins have lived through the last big one that hit the PNW!!! If I was bitten by a vampire i could live forever………right??
oh no. THIS thread again?
See, everyone’s always like “YOU’RE FROM AUSTRALIA? THAT PLACE IS A DEATHTRAP!” but I’d like to point out that we’re in the middle of a continental plate and thus pretty much geologically inert. Our racist, immigrant prime minister (born in the UK) is currently pretending he has a hard-line anti-immigration stance, but really he’s just longing for a return of the White Australia Policy, so you should get in fine providing you’re white. If you’re not, you may have a hard time (but what else is new there).
Also we have socialised medicine for all (funnily enough it’s also called Medicare), health insurance that’s easy to get and not tied to your job, and if it all goes wrong you’ll basically be in a Mad Max film, so it’s win-win.
Also if they give you grief at immigration, point out that the Australian national anthem clearly points out that we’ve got “boundless plains TO SHARE”.
The cool part about growing up at the ass-end of this fault, where it meets the San Andreas, is that you learn from an early age of your impending doom and thus come to terms with your mortality remarkably quickly.
Salt Lake City is a tax little town. But, we are just beyond the instant obliteration zone of th Yellowstone super volcano. That means we are in the slow, excruciatingly painful death zone. Not to mention that we have our own overdue fault and fun liquefaction zones. To be safe from disaster you really have to move to Gary, Indiana.
its not the tsunami and quake you need to worry about. if you know it will happen and know what to do … it is the weeks and months after with no gas/ water/power/ septic/food. everything will be broken no roads to bring in supply’s to stores/gas stations or to bring in parts to fix what is broken 90%of the bridges will need rebuilt or fixed before they can be used.. not having food/ water or a way to get it will kill you even it your building is not damaged.
Personally, I would rather live here on the beautiful Oregon Coast than anywhere else. Every place has something that will get you. Death can come at any time. If the big one does occur, and the plate slides under , it probably will push the magma upward and active the volcanoes in the cascades. So, maybe only Nevada, Wyoming and the Dakotas will be safe.
lets build underground and become real earth people lol
Hmm…perhaps this is a clever ploy by a Northwesterner to dissuade the unwashed masses from continuing to move here and crowd up the place.
Eh, I welcome Tsunami-Death-Quake in the indeterminate future if I means I can keep living here–the most excellent part of the country.
Of course I’m about to leave NY for a job in Portland. My timing is always on par.
Keep quiet about your towns beauty, otherwise folks from California will be happy to ruin it for you..
Do the math. It wasn't remotely a "little bit" nor was the design of the school a democratic process. Building a Super school with every bell and whistle imaginable, while the local lower and middle class foot the absurd bill, without having any say into the features of the school… Insane. They always shout: "think about the kids!" as if emotion will over ride basic logic. All those kids ALREADY LIVE in the inundation zone. The town's location is the issue here. Not ancillary buildings.
The possible link to the Yellowstone caldera (check out timeline of Columbia river basalt flows) is EVEN MORE EXCITING! Ha ha ha ha!
The thing about playing it too safe is that one day you wake up old and realize that you missed out on living in a beautiful place, and nothing would have happened. The coasts are the best, whether the East, West, or Gulf. The West is the most beautiful, however.
Is L.A safe?
You'll be fine. I live here all the time : ) Although I'm now somewhat nervous about my trip to the Oregon coast in September.
I saw the title and was somehow expecting a colorful Narnia reference, perhaps alluding the Second Amendment to the Deep Magic.
But it turns out that would require the Pacific Northwest to perish in fire and water. Oh well.
it’s kind of like a kinder surpise egg. You get chocolate, and a tiny toy to choke on.
My favourite part of the world too – Washington State and Oregon