The Really Big One • Hacker News Board

Re: The Really Big One

#131

Post by Someone » Mon, Jul 13, 2015, 9:12 PM UTC

kenferry wrote: post #35

Is there any work on inducing earthquakes to relieve stress before it builds to catastrophe levels?

I wouldn't call it work yet. "Long-term research" already is somewhat of a compliment.

One problem is that experimentation is risky. If you do an experiment, and a tsunami follows, you are likely to be sued, even if it happens months later. Conversely, there's no way we know of to prove that a man-triggered magnitude quake prevented a more destructive one a few years later. So, you couldn't even prove that that quake with a few billion dollars of damage and a few hundred deaths relatively speaking is a good thing.

Dreamers even envision extracting energy from tectonic plates. Small-scale, that is trivial (you can easily stretch a rubber band a few centimeter a year across a fault line). Large-scale, it could be a huge energy source.

Re: The Really Big One

#132

Post by rodgerd » Mon, Jul 13, 2015, 9:12 PM UTC

Sven7 wrote: post #86

nostrademons wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DiRT drills include the simultaneous loss of whole offices, including the complete obliteration of the Bay Area. Participants are instructed to pretend that they've been eaten by zombies and not communicate with anyone in a remote office, and that's backed up (as described in the article) by cutting the network links to & from the Mountain View corporate office. Now, there may certainly be larger systemic effects…

What happens if Google goes down for a while? Is it really that bad? Yes, Gmail and Drive may cause all kinds of chaos but I think I can survive quite a while without the search engine and YouTube.

> Yes, Gmail and Drive may cause all kinds of chaos but I think I can survive quite a while without the search engine and YouTube.

Perhaps you can, but how many companies are now wholly dependent on Google for their groupware functionality? What happens if you're one of the gaggle of people who make a living off YouTube?

Re: The Really Big One

#133

Post by protomyth » Mon, Jul 13, 2015, 9:14 PM UTC

kenferry wrote: post #35

Is there any work on inducing earthquakes to relieve stress before it builds to catastrophe levels?

There was a bit of discussion on that in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9733034

Re: The Really Big One

#134

Post by GregBuchholz » Mon, Jul 13, 2015, 9:14 PM UTC

davesque wrote: post #98

FYI, the two-hundred year figure that this article mentions appears to be in dispute. Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#Earth... ) includes much more specific, cited information which puts the frequency at 300-600 years between significant quakes with the earthquake of 1700 having occurred after a 780 year lull.

Yes, how about a histogram of the earthquake intervals? Is table 8 on page 102 of:

http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/pp1661f/pp1661f_text.pdf

...the raw data we are looking for? That data looks to have a mean of 530 years, and a standard deviation of 262 years, although it isn't very normal looking (well there are only 18 samples after all, so maybe it isn't too bad). See the histogram I plotted at:

http://imgur.com/4fv7jDJ

...any sources of data with the lower average for the interval? Here's the raw data that I used:

intervals = [250, 305, 446, 311, 982, 492, 415, 665, 661, 1189, 508, 715, 443, 548, 733, 195, 117, 577]

...as for the disagreement on the intervals, the only thing I could find was:

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/how-often-does-casc...

Re: The Really Big One

#135

Post by protomyth » Mon, Jul 13, 2015, 9:17 PM UTC

chrisfosterelli wrote: post #70

someear wrote: post #56

I like to think about how I'd react in the 15 minutes I have between the earthquake and tsunami. How tall would this tsunami be? Quick googling shows the tallest one ever is 524 meters. Assuming the tsunami is that tall, going into tall buildings might not work - tallest building in Seattle, Columbia Tower, is 287 meters (+50m in elevation increase), and is a few blocks from the waterfront . Best bet is to run/bike u…

I wish I could find some definitive resources on whether or not a building would be considered safe in a tsunami, and if it would be better to go for higher floors or lower floors. I imagine that after such a large earth quake, many buildings would be unstable and potentially open to collapse from the force of a tsunami. I'm sure going to higher ground would be a better idea if possible, but say if it was iffy to get…

Remembering a lot of the video from Japan, it looked like most of videos were from people who went into parking garages (concrete)[1]. Regular buildings took a pretty big hit, but I'm not sure how the local building code / materials played in that.

1) I'm going with the logic that surviving video person uploading to youtube is probably a good sample of the "worked" side of the equation.

Re: The Really Big One

#136

Post by jccooper » Mon, Jul 13, 2015, 9:18 PM UTC

eCa wrote: post #74

nkoren wrote: post #27

I used to live in Portland, and thought about this impending catastrophe a lot. Once -- under the influence of intoxicants, most likely -- I came up with a way of dramatically reducing its impact. It's a batshit crazy solution which will never actually happen -- but even when I'm sober, I still think it would work. Here's what I'm thinking: the major problem with a disaster like this is the uncertainty surrounding it…

I'm not really sure why there should be tsunami walls etc built, since the howevermany scores of nukes it takes probably will leave large parts of the pacific northwest uninhabitable (either de facto or by choice) for a while. So, it would be easier, cheaper and safer (but equally infeasible) to simply force resettlement of the population somewhere without a crack in the crust.

Underground nuclear explosions are fairly well contained; done at the depth required to deal with a fault, they'd probably be unnoticeable. Also, perhaps impossible, but that's a different story.

Re: The Really Big One

#137

Post by Locke1689 » Mon, Jul 13, 2015, 9:19 PM UTC

waynecochran wrote: post #99

Locke1689 wrote: post #20

Hmm, in the spirit of thinking of worst-case scenarios, most of the engineering talent for Amazon and Microsoft is in Seattle and Redmond, respectively. There's even a sizable percentage of Google cloud platform in Fremont and Kirkland. Even if most of the employees live, it's likely basic infrastructure will be a disaster for quite a while. Maybe Google would be able to offload ops work to Mountain View, but it seem…

Not only would there be significant downtime of major internet services, but lots of people would die as well!

Well, I live here, so, yeah. I think the people who live here understand we're screwed, the point is what the larger effect will be.

Re: The Really Big One

#138

Post by reitanqild » Mon, Jul 13, 2015, 9:21 PM UTC

cossatot wrote: post #110

nkoren wrote: post #27

I used to live in Portland, and thought about this impending catastrophe a lot. Once -- under the influence of intoxicants, most likely -- I came up with a way of dramatically reducing its impact. It's a batshit crazy solution which will never actually happen -- but even when I'm sober, I still think it would work. Here's what I'm thinking: the major problem with a disaster like this is the uncertainty surrounding it…

From a technical perspective, it's useful to keep in mind that the closest humanity has come to drilling to the appropriate depths offshore is... Deepwater Horizon.

Deepwater horizon was only one of many. The others worked just fine.

Re: The Really Big One

#139

Post by protomyth » Mon, Jul 13, 2015, 9:21 PM UTC

michaelvkpdx wrote: post #80

Silicon Valley refugees and people complaining about Bay Area prices, please note that this is 100% true. Portland will be completely wiped out within the next couple years by a giant earthquake followed by a Sasquatch Apocalypse. Don't move here. You will die. But please visit and enjoy your stay! Love, Portland

Well, the Sasquatch Apocalypse can be dealt with by having some good laws on the books, and this book should help: http://www.amazon.com/The-Emergency-Sasquatch-Ordinance-Actu...

Re: The Really Big One

#140

Post by Locke1689 » Mon, Jul 13, 2015, 9:24 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #72

idlewords wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that you can't really simulate the systemic effects of a really major quake (like a scenario where Mountain View is out of power for weeks).

The DiRT drills include the simultaneous loss of whole offices, including the complete obliteration of the Bay Area. Participants are instructed to pretend that they've been eaten by zombies and not communicate with anyone in a remote office, and that's backed up (as described in the article) by cutting the network links to & from the Mountain View corporate office. Now, there may certainly be larger systemic effects…

Maybe Google is distributed enough to stay up, but I'm pretty sure Microsoft and Amazon are not, and I doubt Google has the spare capacity to handle Azure load, much less Amazon load.