The Really Big One
newyorker.com
The Really Big One
1–10 of 286 posts
Re: The Really Big One
#2As usual, paste this exact url into a google search box to reach a non-paywalled version of the article.
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=http:%2F%2Fwww.newyorke...
Re: The Really Big One
#3[deleted]
Re: The Really Big One
#4As usual, paste this exact url into a google search box to reach a non-paywalled version of the article. https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=http:%2F%2Fwww.newyorke...
or pay for the New Yorker because they do really excellent work.
Re: The Really Big One
#5"The Pacific Northwest sits squarely within the Ring of Fire. Off its coast, an oceanic plate is slipping beneath a continental one. Inland, the Cascade volcanoes mark the line where, far below, the Juan de Fuca plate is heating up and melting everything above it. In other words, the Cascadia subduction zone has, as Goldfinger put it, “all the right anatomical parts.” Yet not once in recorded history has it caused a major earthquake—or, for that matter, any quake to speak of. By contrast, other subduction zones produce major earthquakes occasionally and minor ones all the time: magnitude 5.0, magnitude 4.0, magnitude why are the neighbors moving their sofa at midnight. You can scarcely spend a week in Japan without feeling this sort of earthquake. You can spend a lifetime in many parts of the Northwest—several, in fact, if you had them to spend—and not feel so much as a quiver." This is total crap. There was a 6.8 magnitude earthquake in Seattle in 2001.
Re: The Really Big One
#6As usual, paste this exact url into a google search box to reach a non-paywalled version of the article. https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=http:%2F%2Fwww.newyorke...
or pay for the New Yorker because they do really excellent work.
To read one article once every few months at best is not worth it.
Edit: I spoke my opinion. Down vote me!
Re: The Really Big One
#7"The Pacific Northwest sits squarely within the Ring of Fire. Off its coast, an oceanic plate is slipping beneath a continental one. Inland, the Cascade volcanoes mark the line where, far below, the Juan de Fuca plate is heating up and melting everything above it. In other words, the Cascadia subduction zone has, as Goldfinger put it, “all the right anatomical parts.” Yet not once in recorded history has it caused a…
I wonder if they discounted this because it was (as wikipedia lists it) an "intraslab" earthquake. I'm not a seismologist, but that reads to me like it wasn't an earthquake from the fault line directly, but rather a secondary artifact of the subduction zone.
I agree this is very misleading, but as they tell it through the historical lens, this earthquake also hadn't happened before they realized there could be earthquakes or that they could be big.
Re: The Really Big One
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
or pay for the New Yorker because they do really excellent work.
To read one article once every few months at best is not worth it. Edit: I spoke my opinion. Down vote me!
(If you only read one article every few months, you wouldn't be hitting their pay wall)
Re: The Really Big One
#9"The Pacific Northwest sits squarely within the Ring of Fire. Off its coast, an oceanic plate is slipping beneath a continental one. Inland, the Cascade volcanoes mark the line where, far below, the Juan de Fuca plate is heating up and melting everything above it. In other words, the Cascadia subduction zone has, as Goldfinger put it, “all the right anatomical parts.” Yet not once in recorded history has it caused a…
They are contrasting what they describe as weekly small quakes in Japan with long periods of inactivity in the Pacific Northwest. A significant quake in one city in the region 14 years ago doesn't invalidate the claim that you could spend a significant time in the northwest without feeling a tremor.
Re: The Really Big One
#10Well this article at least justifies that perhaps we don't need to replace the viaduct after all if everything is going to get destroyed anyways!
While my fear of "the big one" doesn't keep me up at night, Seattle is going to be a classic example of "we should have known this was going to happen!" after a sizable earthquake costs substantial life at some point in the future. But this article does seem to stretch itself into making me think that nothing can really be done. It's not going to be realistic to establish safeguards against an 8.5+ if it/or the subsequent tsunami is going to flatten the city west of I-5