This very nice scientist Nicole knows wanted to help put Deathquakenami in perspective. She mostly just made it worse. Also, Nicole wants to get even more mileage out of that Space Needle image she created.
This post is generously sponsored by Elliot Norwood, to whom Deathquakenami presents a clear and present danger.
Everything on Earth is always moving: air currents move across the surface and up and down and in spinning eddies; water flows in the oceans and across the surfaces of continents; lava trickles through the crust and erupts; the rocks in the crust deform and grind against each other and break; thousands of miles of solid rock flow like slow, crushing silly putty in the mantle; the outer core of molten metal spins and eddies; and the solid metal inner core spins in place. It is all in motion, and it is happening on a spinning ball, in a system full of huge rocks hurtling through space around a enormous, unpredictable fusion reactor, all within a moving, spinning galaxy.
In other words, no place is really safe for us squishy living creatures and the little things we build. There is nowhere to hide from all possible hazards: violent windstorms, blizzards, tornadoes, dust storms, rock falls, lightning storms, hurricanes and cyclones, hailstorms, landslides, prolonged hot or cold spells, droughts, flooding rivers and coasts, geomagnetic storms, forest fires, explosive volcanic eruptions, lava flows, mudflows, avalanches, earthquakes, tsunamis, meteorite impacts. Every place on Earth, from deep underground to up in the atmosphere, experiences some of those events, some of the time. You live in a dynamic, hazardous world. At best, you can navigate the risks and live the best life possible in the midst of that.
Plate tectonics has determined that some places are more prone to particular hazards (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions) than others, though. Solid crust and the attached upper mantle lithosphere (the plate) is relatively rigid, and the stresses caused by plate motion are mostly released by deformation and breakage along the boundaries of plates. The majority of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur near those boundaries, as a direct result of plate motion. So while stress can be transmitted across a plate and accommodated by slip along an ancient fault surface far from a tectonic boundary, in, say, Virginia or the Ozarks, most slipping occurs at active tectonic margins, like in the Pacific Northwest; and while some of that slippage occurs quietly and smoothly with no one noticing, much of it happens during violent fracture events. So like most subduction zones, the Cascade region is capable of very large earthquakes caused by slip along major faults. And in between earthquakes, stress between the plates builds up like a compressed spring at their margin, causing the crust to bulge elastically.
Map of tectonic boundaries in the Cascadia region (USGS), and cartoon showing cross-section models across the Cascadia subduction zone before and after a major earthquake (ECY/Washington coast). We are currently in the “before” scenario, with a measurable elastic bulge present along the coast of the Pacific Northwest; the “after” scenario would cause a dramatic drop in elevation along that coast.
Because Earth systems are interconnected –the ocean overlies the solid Earth and is in direct contact with it, resting on it – a large, submarine earthquake accommodating mostly vertical slip will push up or drop down a large mass of ocean water, and the rebound will initiate a very long-wavelength water wave with sufficient energy to travel large distances: a tsunami. The normal hazards associated with any steep-terrained coastal area (like flooding and landslides) can be exacerbated by a major earthquake that both releases a large coastal bulge and triggers a major tsunami.
This week’s New Yorker article is well researched and clearly written, but the information about the risks to the Pacific Northwest is mostly not new. The big story here is not that there is a significant earthquake and tsunami risk in Cascadia: scientists and officials have known that for decades. The important revelation is how little has been done to plan for such an event.
We have a great example of how an industrialized nation with a lot of resources and reasonably good infrastructure can coexist with the natural hazards present along an active tectonic margin: Japan aggressively monitors and prepares for earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes, with overall great success. Japan has a population of 127 million people, overwhelmingly located at the coast. The death count of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami was only 18,550 people. That is, frankly, remarkable: this was the fourth largest earthquake in recorded global history, in a very densely populated region, with a tsunami that averaged 10 meters (33 feet) high at the coast with a peak of 40.5 meters (133 feet) in the most focused location. For comparison, the Indonesian earthquake and tsunami had a casualty count over 200,000, because there were no warning or alert systems, no systematic education efforts, and no measures in place to deliver relief and resources in the immediate aftermath of the event. And researchers are already using the Tohoku outcome to develop even better preparation methods for the future.
Two very obvious factors are necessary to take a geologic event from just geologically interesting to disaster: 1) people and valuable property have to be in harm’s way; and 2) preparation, mitigation, and response must be insufficient for them to survive it. (I should note that when human lives are saved through preventative or mitigating measures, it is typically at enormous expense: as we come to survive hazardous events better and better, the cost of lost infrastructure and property increases rapidly.) Unfortunately, our coasts look like this:
Population distribution by county in the United States.
Most people in the world live in coastal regions. So much for #1, then – it’s too late to just not be there.
So if the goal is to reduce the impact of a major event to the level of a non-disaster, that leaves the second approach: prepare, mitigate, and respond well. When people are already living in harm’s way, preparation is everything. We would be smart to emulate Japan’s example, but instead in many ways we have starved the government bodies and programs responsible for monitoring hazards, issuing warnings, and implementing mitigation and response programs.
Unfortunately, it is very hard to convince people to spend their collective funds and energy preparing for high-risk, low-frequency events. The human brain conceives of risk and probability… poorly. Important cognitive and other biases come into play, including: selection biases in gathering and evaluating hazard data sets (for example, over- or underestimating the frequency or maximum size of events because the data collection timeline is too short), fallacies like gambler’s and hot-hand for truly random events (mistaken beliefs that the probability of a random event will change in response to its recent frequency), negativity bias (the stronger psychological impact of negative or traumatic thoughts and events) and loss aversion (the tendency to more strongly avoid losses than to acquire gains), probability neglect (tendency to disregard probabilities in decision making, either neglecting or inflating risks), and the affect heuristic (making decisions principally based on emotional response); but especially the availability heuristic (favoring recent or more vividly remembered events over less striking ones when making decisions; think of the increased concern and panic following, say, the New Yorker article vs. the general complacency about this issue the day before!) and normalcy bias (the tendency of people living in a hazardous area to underestimate the likelihood and severity of a disaster; think of a frog in a slowly heated pot). Your brain just fundamentally misjudges frequency and risk, especially for rare, catastrophic events, so you simply cannot trust it when making value judgments about the best ways to prepare for these events.
Expert guidance, though, hopefully takes those biases into account as much as possible, and in a place like the U.S., agency officials usually have enough experience and training in the pitfalls of hazard management to avoid the more common rookie mistakes (for example, responding to one disaster by increasing the sensitivity of future alerts, which proportionally increases false alarms and ultimately decreases public confidence so people stop heeding warnings). Politicians aren’t usually trained in this work and suffer from the same human errors in judgment as the rest of us, with an elevated aversion to risking public displeasure – but good ones will listen to the experts and agencies even when it’s politically inconvenient. And a smart government should not ask the public to vote on whether or not to fund efforts that are both so important and so evocative of illogical judgment.
In other words, and particularly for Cascadia: please tell your Pacific Northwest government officials to consult with appropriate experts and then implement good evacuation routes and improve local infrastructure, with an eye toward earthquake, tsunami, flood, and landslide safety. If funding for hazard mitigation and preparation is up for a public vote or referendum, consider voting and even campaigning for it. And if you must live there and have the ability to relocate locally, please try to choose a location that isn’t sitting on loose mud, that is well above both the coast and local river levels, that is not near or on steep slopes, and that has good access to major transportation routes for evacuation, and avoid building new construction or infrastructure in more hazardous locations.
For everyone else: I guarantee that you live in a risky place, too, because it is in this universe. Please read FEMA (for U.S. residents) and local government hazard guidelines for your area and follow their preparation recommendations. Learn some basic, general hazardous event safety tips.* If you are relocating to a new area, some places (like particular places in the Pacific Northwest, or the city of New Orleans) are particularly hazardous, so if you have the freedom to choose you may wish to consider another destination. And if you lack that regional choice but can freely decide where to live or own property locally, please don’t rely on programs like government-subsidized flood insurance to determine whether a location is safe: subsidies can distort perceptions of risk and have encouraged many people to build and live in harm’s way. In general, if a piece of property is uninsurable for a hazard considered high-risk in your region (like flood insurance for properties near large rivers), consider choosing another location instead, to the extent that you can. Insurance risk models are very sophisticated and not governed by cognitive bias, so they are usually among the best risk assessments available.
And then please, please go live your life without obsessing any further. If there is nowhere in the solar system that you can go to escape natural hazards, and your perceptions of the risks are probably either much too high or much too low, then there is no point in being consumed by worry. Take some intelligent, well-informed, relatively straightforward precautions, try to make reasonable choices to minimize your local risks, and then enjoy living on this spectacular, dynamic Earth.
***
*A partial list of helpful tips:
If you’re in an electrical storm with no shelter, and your hair starts to stand up, remove all metal objects from your body and squat low to the ground, with your heels or knees together if you are physically able. Don’t lie down on the ground. If it’s available, shelter in a car or sturdy building instead.
If there is a tornado approaching and you have no shelter, DO lie down, in the lowest ditch you can find (not in an underpass) and protect your head. Shelter in a sturdy, windowless basement or building if you can, but do NOT shelter in a car.
In an earthquake, head for open ground away from buildings; if you cannot quickly escape the building, shelter under sturdy furniture instead. Do NOT stand in doorways.
Keep an emergency bag (change of clothes, extra water, important documents, emergency food for you and pets) ready to go if you live in forest fire country and the risk is considered elevated.
Similar emergency kits are a good idea for homes and cars for other hazards that can lead to evacuation, like volcanic eruptions, hurricanes in coastal regions, and serious floods if you are near the coast or a body of water. Check your local recommendations!
Tags: advice, deathquakenami, earthquakes, lynne elkins, science
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You live in a dynamic, hazardous world. At best, you can navigate the risks and live the best life possible in the midst of that.
So, you’re basically saying that life is just a party and parties weren’t meant to last.
Indeed.
Until the sky starts turning purple I think we’re all good.
But as soon as that happens y’all can try to run from the destruction. You know I won’t even care.
So good, thank you for writing it!!!
Here’s my paranoia question: What about the trees? Will they topple? Will they be completely uprooted? Will they mainly just lose a few branches? The house where I grew up and where my family still lives is surrounded by dozens (hundreds throughout the neighborhood) of enormous Douglas fir trees. In windstorms or ice storms, even just one branch falling will often cause great damage to a house (our neighbors had a gaping hole in their roof for months thanks to a single branch a few years ago.) How would these trees respond to a massive earthquake in an area that is primarily sedimentary rock that for sure is going to be liquefied? Basically, HOW SCREWED ARE WE?
Sedimentary rocks fare pretty well and don’t liquefy! It’s loose mud with water in the pore space that can liquefy during shaking.
I’m not an expert on tree response? But I expect they are more flexible than buildings, which is a good thing. Wooden structures do much better than, say, bricks in earthquakes.
Thank you for providing me a handy link to send to those relatives and distant friends who have decided to breathlessly link me to the NYT article, as if somehow I’d been living along the Ring of Fire my entire adult life without knowing it…
Thanks, Lynne, and thanks Elliot too! Between this, that AMA this morning, and the liquefaction map I just looked at that shows that both my work and my home are at a fairly low risk of sinking into the earth never to be seen again, my concerns are mostly reduced to “what if the plate sinks so far I get flooded?” and “when talking about emergency preparedness, why do people say you should have at least a week’s worth of supplies but never say what you’re supposed to do about your shit? Especially since a lot of my emergency food is canned beans?”
I’m trying to read the King County liquefaction map now, but they picked the worse color legend for a color-blind person. The colors for low risk and high risk look the same to me!
Oh man, that’s not helpful at all!
Well that’s just mean.
Oh geez, yeah, geologists can be really bad about color blindness and color schemes for maps. Sorry, on behalf of my colleagues!
I don’t think this is something an expert in the science would know about, but I expect that in an apocalyptic scenario, there will be poop everywhere. It just isn’t sexy to put that in fiction books and movies.
Or childbirth classes…
That’s kind of what I figured, which is why I’m just going to keep collecting buckets.
Short term: Days or weeks. Look into backpacking methods of poop disposal. Most backpacking areas (if not all) do not allow pooping in the woods any more, and you are supposed to pack out all your poop. For reals. There are various systems to contain the poop so that it can be packed out with no unpleasant accidents.
This can be useful even in a city where no natural disaster has occurred. I’ve used my backpacking poop disposal system for *cough* some time *cough* during some problems with the city sewer as a result of poorly maintained infrastructure.
Long term: Depending on location, sooner or later, latrines/outhouses/whateveryouwanttocallthem. Again, depending on your location, you would have to figure out the ‘best’ location for them. They are not ideal, but better than poop in all locations. And if you make preparations ahead of time, you could do one of the composting ones. They aren’t that hard to make (even with buckets) and like any composting, will work as long as you keep up on the maintenance.
It’s not an insurmountable problem, but yeah, it’s one of those things people often don’t consider until the toilets no longer flush. 😛
This is the place that I most hoped the comments would go.
There’s actually a toilet seat you can buy that can be attached to a bucket to use as a temporary toilet, and substances that you can add to help neutralize the more unpleasant odors….doesn’t help you a ton when everyone ELSE in the neighborhood is pooping wherever, I guess, but you can at least ensure that you and your family can poop in relative modernity….?
I wonder if that terrible cutesy thing that you add a couple drops of to the toilet so your shit literally doesn’t stink would work in that situation? I hated the commercials for it, because I would like the world to accept that women sometimes poo, but maybe it could actually come in handy.
I think it requires a water surface, and adding water to a bucket toilet seems like it would make things worse, so probably it wouldn’t be helpful.
Lye is the standard thing you put down outhouses to neutralize the smell. I don’t think it’s very costly, you could just have a box of that in with your supplies.
Oh, I even have some lye already for cooking purposes. Good to know it can serve for this too.
I spent several years of my childhood without indoor plumbing and we always just used wood ashes down the outhouse. If utilities are out, it’s likely you might be burning things for warmth/cooking, so the ashes could be used once you run out of lye.
For reals, though: my emergency kit includes a bucket with a tight-fitting lid (procured at Home Depot for $2), garbage bags, and a bag of deodorizing kitty litter.
I refuse to prepare for this, because I’m 99.99% sure I’d rather just die than survive in a post-apocalyptic, post-functional-sewer-system world where I had to poop in a bucket.
That’s the “plastic bags” portion of the FEMA emergency supplies list, I believe. Or rather “Moist towelettes, garbage bags and plastic ties for personal sanitation…”
PDF link: http://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/1390846764…
Ooh ooh, Cody Lundin (barefoot guy from awhile ago on Dual Survival on some cable channel) is all over this in his book When All Hell Breaks Loose: Stuff You Need To Survive When Disaster Strikes. It’s a fascinating book. He even talks about how important it is to have a disaster shitter setup that you/your family are comfortable with using because otherwise constipation can be a big problem… and… it gets a little graphic. Anyway, really practical and thorough book.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/142360105X/ref=pd_a…
Don’t lie on the ground in a thunderstorm? Don’t stand in a doorway during an earthquake? I wonder how many other “what to do in case of….” facts in my head (probably all from this one disasters book I loved to terrify myself with as a kid) are wrong/outdated.
Fantastic post, by the way!
Yes, that is why I added them — practical knowledge that for most people is very out of date.
For lightning storms, it’s been recognized that the electrical discharge of a ground strike can travel at least 50 feet out from the strike and affect people through the ground. So you do want to minimize your height so you don’t attract a direct strike to your head, but you also don’t want to couple your heart to the ground and risk zapping it from 50 feet away. Squatting to lower your height, while creating a short-circuit through your legs (that doesn’t go through your heart) might increase survival rates if there is a nearby strike. Or that is the thinking.
And the doorway thing is mostly because the door might swing and hit you or pinch your fingers, right? Doorways were recommended in kindergarten, but I think we got the updated no-doorways recommendation in high school.
Doorways were thought to be more stable than the rest of a house, but it mostly isn’t true (or true enough to matter).
I want just a whole list of these! When the Mid-Atlantic had that earthquake a couple of years ago, my husband and I (who have never lived in earthquake-prone areas) spent the entire duration of the earthquake yelling at each other about what we were supposed to be doing to protect ourselves.
THANK YOU.
I very rarely want to criticize Toast editorial choices but I was kind of taken aback by the kinda… fear-mongering? articles the last couple days on this topic. I get that it was #jokes but it’s an upsetting topic for jokes, not to mention that it kept popping back up in other contexts, and this was the balanced response needed to put things into perspective. I really, really appreciate it.
(I really don’t like criticizing ahh I’m sorry. The coverage just rubbed me the wrong way. Like those shingles ads. Super sorry though.)
It’s ok! At least from the POV of a random stranger, you should never feel bad for giving constructive criticism or thoughtfully articulating your feelings on a piece. One of the things I love about the Toast comment section is the fact that it is heavily moderated, making it a safe space where you are probably not going to encounter assholes, but the fact that you can say “the effect of this piece was X, perhaps it was not good in all areas” is a good thing. A blue ribbon to you for politely providing constructive criticism.
Oh man, the ones that are all IF YOU HAVE HAD THE CHICKEN POX, SHINGLES MAY ALREADY BE IN YOUR BODY?? They play them on loop at my doctor’s office so much that my sister and I have started referring to the CCTV there as Shingles TV.
I hate the fear-mongering of shingles, but have also watched my brother, SIL, and partner get it, all before age 40, and my mother get it at 63, and that shit is Not Pleasant. I want that vaccine in the worst way.
How many times do I have to say it, people?!? You gotta die of something. The sooner you make peace with it, the better. Because you could die tomorrow.
For me (born and raised in the PNW, came back after school hoping to live the rest of my life here), it’s about more than being scared of dying, although that certainly plays a part. It’s also about surviving to see the place I love destroyed and the people who live here suffering. People will lose their loved ones, their homes, their livelihoods- even if we don’t all die, our lives as we know them will be wiped out, and I think it’s valid to be freaked out about it.
This, exactly. I love the PNW, more than just about anywhere I’ve ever lived, and the thought that it could all be gone (or changed, in a terrible, horrible way) is terrifying and deeply upsetting.
I hate feeling like I can never go back to somewhere I love so much, but the past few days’ discussions have made me very, very scared to ever return.
This is how I feel about it, too. BUT IT CALLS TO ME. I’m still gonna leap at the first good job offer my husband gets there. (My job will travel.)
This is what makes me the saddest about global warming. Not that it’s a global catastrophe with horrible ramifications for both humans and the rest of the living organisms on this planet, but the fact that the Outer Banks will be gone.
There could still be barrier islands! They just won’t be in those places anymore. They’ll move inland as the coastline retreats.
Yeah, the other lesson in this is that nothing we make is permanent. Which is true, of course, but not easy. Look at how much effort and money was put into rebuilding parts of New Orleans after Katrina — despite the fact that none of the levees that failed were the really scary ones (the ones on the Mississippi), and the delta location is intrinsically unstable in the long run. No one wants to abandon a vibrant, culturally and historically important city where millions of people live. No one is going to want to abandon Seattle or Portland wholesale, either. There just isn’t an easy solution to these situations, except to prepare as best we can and try to correct old mistakes with any future development.
The thing that comforts me for this one is I think about how much my own city has changed in the last ten years, say. Not huge swathes of it, but lots of buildings that were an intrinsic part of the landscape are gone or drastically different.
Change and rebuilding and loss of landscape are obviously so different after a disaster. But it’s not like, if we don’t experience a disaster, nothing changes. It just is easier to get used to.
This fully confirms my decision to wear a helmet at all times.
Thank you for this! The article was making the rounds in my geology sphere, but I didn’t feel qualified enough to comment on it (mostly because my knowledge of earthquakes and tectonics is limited to petrology and what happens after subduction, not necessarily the process that gets you to that point.). One of the things that threw me off, though, was the fact that geologic time was kinda…ignored? Like, okay, if there was a major earthquake in the 1600s, that’s 400 years ago, and 400 years in the scheme of geologic time is kinda…bupkis.
Well, for periodic events like earthquakes, short time scales matter a lot! The bigger issue is the one the New Yorker touches on about recurrence intervals being average time intervals, not a ticking clock. Nothing is “overdue” here — that’s not how it works. There is just a certain probability that an earthquake of a specific magnitude will happen in a certain time window on this specific fault. We can’t be any more specific than that.
That was the part of the article that bothered me most, actually: I don’t know much about geology, but I’m pretty sure the “clock” doesn’t tick that way in a subduction zone. Shouldn’t it depend on the rate of movement, the elasticity of the overriding plate, and a bunch of other factors that are typically unknown?
Yes, many factors are involved, and not all of them are well constrained. A major subduction earthquake (I don’t know what definition of “major” is being used for this stat, but it’s usually something like M7.0 or greater) has a 1 in 300 (0.33%) chance of happening in any given year in Cascadia. That could easily be a much smaller event than the worst-case scenario in the New Yorker article, of course. And that probability will be the same next year as it is this year: it doesn’t increase next year just because doesn’t happen this year. It stays 0.33%. Which is a small chance! Because years are very small increments, geologically speaking! But that also means it’s ~100% likely to happen some time in the next ~300 years.
I HATE it when people use statistics this way. Like ‘stats are 1 in 5 people die of this disease, 15 people got it but only 2 died??? Statistics is a lie???’
No, statistics is a mathematical tool to extrapolate our knowledge of past events into possible future events. It’s not rules, it’s just patterns. And (at least in diseases, idk about earthquakes) every situation brings with it new variables, many of which we can’t know about. Maybe next year the stat for that disease will be 1 in 7 people. Don’t say ‘I don’t wanna be a statistic’ YOU ARE A STATISTIC, either way. And that’s a wonderful thing.
Okay, thank you! I wish I’d had more of a focus on tectonics and earthquakes, but they’re not as prevalent over here on the east coast so my professors sort of glossed over that fact. I appreciate the correction!
My biggest fear when it comes to emergency preparedness is communication, now that very few people have land lines anymore. Considering cellular networks go down when you look at them funny, and phone batteries die within hours, and no one actually memorizes phone numbers anymore, we’re pretty much back to smoke signals and Morse code by flashlight in any given disaster, right?
that, and learning how very little we know without an internet brain backup.
Don’t worry! I’m pretty sure the wires for land lines wouldn’t survive major disasters either.
On a brighter note, there are volunteer organizations of amateur radio operators who help with communication in emergencies. This Wikipedia page is probably a good place to start if you want to learn more.
Yes! The radio nerds will save us all in the apocalypse.
This is actually why a lot of emergency responder centers use air sirens to notify emergency personnel to report in, at least in communities where they don’t have regular tornado siren use/drills (since the use of multiple sirens would be confusing). If cell towers go down and power goes out, they can still use that siren.
My dad literally used to have the job of calling up all the different telecommunications companies every year and going over their emergency plans with them. Not just for natural disasters and terrorist attacks and such, but also like “if there’s a pandemic, and 1/3 of your employees are quarantined and can’t come in to work, how will you make sure the phones don’t go down”.
So people are thinking of that!
So I googled “FEMA recommendations [my city]” and all I can find are pages and pages of bureaucratese about what FEMA does and why. Can anyone help with a better search string for finding the actual things that regular folks are recommended to do?
Also, thanks so much for this realistic article!
Search terms to try:
Disaster preparedness recommendations – look for results ending in .gov or .org
Choose your own disaster (earthquake, tsunami, flood, tornado, etc.), for different results. Replace “preparedness recommendations” with:
– maps
– plans
– strategy
– report
– survey
– impacts
California has a My Hazards Awareness Map. The Cascadia region has a great group called CREW which has hazard maps. The DNR in Washington has a site about geologic hazards, too.
The CDC has an extensive Emergency Preparedness site too. While it’s not city specific, it’s helpful for general disaster prep. Here’s the link to the part about natural disasters (tho it covers all sorts of events) : http://emergency.cdc.gov/disasters/index.asp
Thanks for adding this. The CDC recommendations are going to be good general info. Local and state documents will vary a lot from place to place, so it’s more local information.
Here’s your basic kit for the generic emergencies, too: http://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/1390846764…
Know your area, too- for example mine is probably about 0 earthquakes, moderate to high flash-flooding, largely decorative tornadoes, moderate to high thunderstorm risk, and moderate “city fucked up” water or power outages. So mostly we keep an emergency water supply and lots of flashlights around, but, like, three days of food/ what we keep in our pantry is pretty much going to do the trick otherwise. I also have a killer first aid kit, but that’s because we’re accident prone in my household.
One thing that I haven’t seen discussed: In the event of The Big Slip, what happens with the volcanoes? I can see three of them from where I’m sitting.
There was a reddit ama where that question came up a lot: Short answer, it would seem there is a small chance (10%ish?) of increased volcanic activity due to this, but overall it is not a major hazard to be concerned about (compared to all the rest of the badness)
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3da1mh/we_…
Hard to say, but probably not a lot. Severe shaking could make some changes in a geothermal plumbing system, so fumaroles or geysers might change geometry and start up or stop, but most of the magma is kilometers underground. If it’s already overpressurized and just temporarily prevented from erupting by a rock or detritis plug in the conduit, and that plug is shifted or broken up by shaking, maybe that would trigger an eruption? But those are pretty particular circumstances, and if that’s the case I wouldn’t be surprised if that thing was probably going to erupt soon anyway.
Volcanic eruptions, and magma and gas movement in the subsurface, also cause earthquakes recorded by seismometers (and surface explosions, which are also picked up by seismometers), but they are local and have a different seismic signature from fault motion in a normal earthquake. Volcanic seismicity is quite different.
That is SO interesting! I guess in my mind I had always assumed that they were more tightly interwoven.
Thank you for the answer!
It’s easy to forget the distances involved! The subduction zone fault surfaces are either very deep (which is less dangerous for us living on the surface), or shallower but offshore. The volcanoes are more or less surficial (magma chambers usually pool a few to a few tens of km down, and the eruption vents are of course right at the surface) and located inland along the volcanic front. And the melting that produces the magma that rises and makes volcanoes at the surface is occurring very, very deep underground. It takes place in the mantle over the subducting slab, not in the crust. It’s happening because of the tectonic setting (dehydration of the subducting plate adds water to the mantle wedge and initiates melting of mantle rocks), and earthquakes are also being caused by the tectonic setting (the upper surface of the subduction slab scraping against the overriding plate), but the earthquakes and volcanoes aren’t related otherwise.
Disgusting metaphor: It’s like worrying that breaking your jaw might also pop your chin zits.
Also worth noting that tsunami maps are based on current elevations, so if this Cascadia Eruption occurs and takes the hump out of the topography, what’s that going to do to those mapped regions that are outside of the red zone? And what if the tsunami comes after our sea ice has melted so much that we reach the plus/minus 5M elevation in sea level?
We need a map that shows pre-earthquake tsunami zones, post-earthquake estimates of topographic loss, coupled with new tsunami zones, and then an overlay on that map of what climate change is going to do in both topographic scenarios/realities. FUN STUFF.
I think that the modelers actually do try to do these things, to the extent possible! There was a Cascadia tsunami report that was put together pretty recently — I’m not an expert on that topic specifically, but I know it was worked on and I’d be surprised if they didn’t address the subsidence issue, at least as well as anyone can with current technology. The effect of rising sea level is also important for tsunami modeling and forecasting, but those are longer-term changes: next year’s impact would be about the same as this year’s.
Hey, in the 2001 Nisqually quake, the doorway was the only thing I could remember to do, at least I was in one without a door. I think it’s that arches/entries are generally pretty reinforced.
Growing up here, you sort of get immune to the idea of an earthquake. yeah yeah it’s coming but you don’t know when and you can’t really watch a weather forecast for one. But now that I have kids, I’m super paranoid about one and the New Yorker article amde me want to max out a credit card on emergency kits. (It also made me want to move east of I-5 to someplace flat and not a flood plain or at the base of a hill, but baby steps!)
Yeah, that’s the combination of the normalcy bias and then the affect heuristic thing with the emotional response. We are all prone to those reactions!
Fwiw, most flat areas are going to be floodplains (some might be ancient lakes, but most are river floodplains). The question is how close to the river it is — is it the 5-year flood floodplain (probably a bad choice), or is it an ancient incised terrace 500 feet above the river (probably cool)?
I figure if I avoid the Kent/Skagit/Orting valleys and aim for someplace like Enumclaw, I should be reasonably okay until Rainier erupts and oh screw it I’m dead either way.
Rainier is mostly a hazard if you live along one of the lahar-prone valleys, or within a few km of the summit: http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/volcanoes/mount_rainier…
Otherwise the main regional hazard from Cascade volcanoes is ashfall, which is something to be prepared for but typically not crippling.
I enjoyed this article and am very glad that it was run. I do find it funny to see the frog in a boiling pot myth brought up, since as far as I know, a frog will jump out of a pot once it’s uncomfortably warm. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/200…
Ha! But it’s a useful analogy for familiarity, I guess.
I AM SO DELIGHTED THIS ARTICLE IS CAUSING MORE PEOPLE TO LEARN ABOUT PLATE TECTONICS AND GEOLOGY!!! 😀
I hope that this doesn’t cause more people to get confused about estimating probabilities of earthquakes and think that geophysics people can actually predict them though… *long side-eye at San Andreas movie*.
Also its really good that you included some tips on what to do in case of earthquakes. Most of my friends were convinced that doorways were the way to go, and I was like “nooooooooo get under a table/desk/sturdy thing or get outside!” We don’t get many big earthquakes that often in Phoenix, but a lot of my friends are traveling (One is in Istanbul which worries me) so I wanted to make sure they were going to be safe!
Another useful response by some local experts: http://q13fox.com/2015/07/13/local-experts-respon…
If anyone wants to do some surprisingly not terribly dry reading about the dynamic between earthquakes and buildings particularly, this FEMA article is a pretty reasonable read: http://www.fema.gov/media-library/assets/document…
And, if you’re needing a more hopeful viewpoint, here is a list of FEMA case studies of people who prepared for things and then were okay: http://www.fema.gov/mitigation-best-practices-por…
I love your passion for geology, and your “prepare, then don’t stress” advice. So crucial, and so hard to remember when the news is all DOOMSDAY-y. Do you teach at university, or K-12? (I ask because I train science nerds to becoming science TEACHER nerds, in K-12, and I’m always looking for passionate, articulate rock hounds!)
I’m university faculty.
I couldn’t do more than skim this even though I do not live in the US and I am not actually concerned about earthquakes and I’m pretty sure this article is meant to be reassuring. But I have had to SEVERELY limit my disaster information reading, after having a panic attack on the train a couple of months ago, about climate change.
Thing I actually said to my partner last night ‘well, if we’re LUCKY, there’ll be a solar flare (this is my new thing to freak out about help I don’t want to be a prepper) and then industry will shut down and we’ll only get a teeny bit of climate change’.
Well, it could be sort of reassuring but mostly just realistic, I think. I’m sorry these things make you panic! My message is mostly along the lines of “these things will happen and we can’t control the planet or hide from them, but we can be reasonably well prepared and try to make informed choices.” Which applies to climate change, too: it’s already underway and we are well past the point of no return, so now we need to adapt. Happily, we’re a very adaptable species.
Okay, thank you! I wish I'd had more of a focus on tectonics and earthquakes, but they're not as prevalent over here on the east coast so my professors sort of glossed over that fact. I appreciate the correction!
I'm university faculty.
Well, it could be sort of reassuring but mostly just realistic, I think. I'm sorry these things make you panic! My message is mostly along the lines of "these things will happen and we can't control the planet or hide from them, but we can be reasonably well prepared and try to make informed choices." Which applies to climate change, too: it's already underway and we are well past the point of no return, so now we need to adapt. Happily, we're a very adaptable species.
Ooh ooh, Cody Lundin (barefoot guy from awhile ago on Dual Survival on some cable channel) is all over this in his book When All Hell Breaks Loose: Stuff You Need To Survive When Disaster Strikes. It's a fascinating book. He even talks about how important it is to have a disaster shitter setup that you/your family are comfortable with using because otherwise constipation can be a big problem… and… it gets a little graphic. Anyway, really practical and thorough book.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/142360105X/ref=pd_a…
IT’S GONNA HAPPEN WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE OUT HERE PLEASE DON’T MOVE HERE. STAY AWAY PNW=DEATH ZONE!!!!!!!!