Apocalypse Approaching?

The Pacific Northwest and part of California is in danger of being devastated by an earthquake.

A new, much-talked-about article is on the internet. It tells of a horrifying natural disaster, "the really big one," that may or may not kill me and my neighbors.

"Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada." This begins a section of a controversial new article on the New Yorker website. Long story short, the Juan de Fuca oceanic plate is slipping beneath the North America tectonic plate, but North America isn't going over the oceanic plate, so that they are jammed into each other. Under pressure, the jammed part is bulging upward and compressing eastward. Although the plate is relatively flexible, it will have to stop at some point, and when this happens, North America will "rebound, like a spring," according to the article.

"If, on that occasion, only the southern part of the Cascadian subduction zone gives away...the magnitude of the resulting [earth]quake will be somewhere between 8.0 and 8.6...If the entire zone gives way at once, an event seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the earthquake will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That's the very big one."

But that's not all.

Again, to put it briefly, the rebound will cause a shift beneath the ocean, a "seven-hundred-mile liquid wall will reach the Northwest coast," a more elaborate wording for "tsunami."

The areas you hear mentioned most in this section of the article happen to be from Seattle to Salem, as you can see on the map above. Unfortunately I live in Seattle.

Fortunately, there's only a 10% chance that it'll happen in the next 50 years. Unfortunately, 50 years is a long time, and 10% are not small enough odds for such a huge event.

But we have more good news. It is unlikely that major cities will be damaged. Seattle will most likely be protected by the Puget Sound. Anything east of Interstate 5 will probably be safe.

Unfortunately, the fabulous Olympic National Park, which I just recently visited, will probably be hit pretty badly.

Few people in other parts of the country, I have learned from experience, think about our little neck of the woods up here. It's not really a place you'd expect for a natural disaster to happen. It's not exactly Tornado Alley around here. The worst things that have happened in the last 20 years, pretty much, is the Oso landslide and the recent wildfires.

I just hope the world doesn't end while I'm out on a tiny island, throwing jellyfish at somebody.