Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t IceAgeNow – seismologist Chris Goldfinger has warned that a gigantic Earthquake, just off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, with the potential to kill over 10,000 American people, is many decades overdue.
According to The New Yorker;
San Andreas, which runs nearly the length of California and is perpetually rumored to be on the verge of unleashing “the big one.” That rumor is misleading, no matter what the San Andreas ever does. Every fault line has an upper limit to its potency, determined by its length and width, and by how far it can slip. For the San Andreas, one of the most extensively studied and best understood fault lines in the world, that upper limit is roughly an 8.2—a powerful earthquake, but, because the Richter scale is logarithmic, only six per cent as strong as the 2011 event in Japan.
Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada. The “Cascadia” part of its name comes from the Cascade Range, a chain of volcanic mountains that follow the same course a hundred or so miles inland. The “subduction zone” part refers to a region of the planet where one tectonic plate is sliding underneath (subducting) another. Tectonic plates are those slabs of mantle and crust that, in their epochs-long drift, rearrange the earth’s continents and oceans. Most of the time, their movement is slow, harmless, and all but undetectable. Occasionally, at the borders where they meet, it is not.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one
The Earthquake and tsunami are not the only problems which victims of the coming Earthquake will face. According to The New Yorker, Fifteen per cent of Seattle is built on liquefiable land, including seventeen day-care centers and the homes of some thirty-four thousand five hundred people. . Liquefiable land is exactly what it sounds like – during a strong Earthquake it temporarily turns to a liquid similar to quicksand. Anything solid simply sinks into the ground.
The odds of a major in the next 50 years are estimated as one in three, or a “full rupture”, which would generate a magnitude 9+ Earthquake just off the coast of the Western seaboard, as one in ten.
In the wake of the devastating 2011 Japan Earthquake, Japan has been busy deploying Earthquake early warning sensors throughout the country. Earthquakes create non destructive “P waves“, which can be detected ahead of the main quake, providing a few minutes warning.
The following Fox News interview claims there is no budget to deploy a Japanese style early warning system in the Seattle area, or any of the other regions at risk from the Cascadia fault – perhaps local government departments are too busy writing “global warming impact” studies, to give attention to Earthquake risks.
http://video.foxnews.com/v/video-embed.html?video_id=4356513070001According to the video, if a full rupture Earthquake strikes, everything West of Interstate 5 will be “toast”.
The last time the Cascadia fault produced a major Earthquake was in 1700, and there is evidence of 41 similar events occurring roughly every 240 years, stretching back over the last 10,000 years, so there is strong historical evidence that this is a real and present danger to the citizens of the American Northwest. The next Earthquake is at least 60 years overdue.
As a native Oregonian who has spent most his life in the Willamette Valley I thought I would add a few things. Roughly half the states population lives within the Valley. The ways in an out are few, the Valley is hemmed in on the east and west side by mountains with very few paved roads over them. To the East are the cascades, dams, volcanoes and roads that will probably be impassible after a major quake. To the west is the Coast Range (folded mountains) that are highly unstable with few paved roads that need constant repair as it is. North and south is I5 crossing bridges that are not earthquake proof. The Willamette Valley most certainly will be isolated, only way in will likely be a couple air ports.
Due to the above, coastal people will be isolated as the roads getting out will be gone. Central and Eastern Oregon will be somewhat OK, a lot of the goods travel from the Willamette Valley over the Cascades to them but routes can be altered to bring in goods from the east.
Yes, expect the survivors to go a long period of time without aid. Oh, I think the 10k dead is to low of a number if it hits when the dams are full. Those go and say good bye to a heck of a lot of people. Eugene sits below quite a few dams. Salem sits below several dams. Portland sits below more dams than I care to count, did you know Portland is only 30ft above sea level? If the big one happens during the summer, well most folks head to the coast to avoid the inland heat if they can swing it. Nothing like dropping 30 degrees in temperature by driving a short ways west.
Chris Goldfinger at Academia.edu.
Now it is clear.
Academia.edu is an old fraud site from before 2000.
Not a university, .edu, but a fraud site backed by fraud funding from ‘venture capital’. [from Wikipedia.org]
“In November 2011, Academia.edu raised $4.5 million from Spark Capital and True Ventures. Prior to that, it had raised $2.2 million from Spark Ventures and a range of angel investors including Mark Shuttleworth, Thomas Lehrman, and Rupert Pennant-Rea. As of March 2014, Academia.edu claimed to have raised $17.7 million from Khosla Ventures, True Ventures, Spark Ventures, Spark Capital and Rupert Pennant-Rea.”
They engage in copying copyrighted works as if their own and even use the e-mail contacts of victims as a means to commit credit card fraud.
Ha ha
[Substantial charges, if true. If not substantiated, then meaningless. .mod]
It’s only 14 minutes and looks like it won’t be much in the beginning, but it is total initiation at the end.
…annihilation at the end
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/05/26/claim-new-chinese-nuclear-plants-are-unsafe/#comment-1946251
Fearless Fukushiming Leader: We’ll put the emergency cooling water systems down near the beach – what could go wrong?
Newby on Team: What about tsunami’s?
Fearless Leader: Screw it! It’s time for lunch. Are you a team player or not?
Team: Hai ! ( OK! )
….
Later…
Team: Oh Fukushima!
Look at the bright side: No more Microsoft.
Well – there is an Aboriginal legend regarding ‘The Last Wave’, hitting the Easter side of Australia. There was a film made years ago staring Richard Chamberlain. There is a trench west of New Zealand I can’t remember the name, but if it were to collapse then it would create a big tsunami. But whether it would affect Sydney is doubtful. Sydney is built around the harbor and many inlets with most homes built actually high above sea level.
Anyway, let’s hope that this won’t happen, but tsunami’s often kill more people than an earthquake.
While all the physical problems coming from this would be devistation for those living in the area, the economic impact to the world would effect far more people.
Many of the import ports would be disrupted for a serious length of time. With our $22 trillion dollar plus debt and the federal government expected to pick up most of the repair costs, our economy would be thrown into another recession, if not worse. We have no economic wiggle room to absorb this now.
I posted this March 12, 2011 in the Vancouver Sun.
http://www.pressreader.com/canada/the-vancouver-sun/20110312/295137268925180/TextView
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During this event, Japan residents got 10 to 15 minutes warning to move to higher ground. The tsunami alarm was issued 3 minutes after the earthquake occurred.
If the Cascadia fault ruptured, the folks at Tofino would get about that much warning, assuming our tsunami warning system worked perfectly.
In Vancouver, they would get about 30 minutes warning. Ever try to evacuate Surrey and Delta in 30 minutes? Yeah, that’ll work.
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A tsunami wave moves over the open ocean at speeds over 700 km/h (500 mph).
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-20042318-76.html
The tsunami warning system worked Friday, with the agency alerting people to imminent tsunamis within three minutes of the quake, and the first waves struck 10 to 15 minutes later. The alert may have saved hundreds of lives, as some residents were able to flee to higher ground.
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-20042318-76.html#ixzz1GPmFesDo
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/24/calculations-suggest-that-global-warming-caused-by-the-doubling-of-co2-will-be-less-than-0-6k/#comment-1822226
True Story. OT, but kindly bear with me Moderator, concerning a very strange event that happened ten years ago today.
My girlfriend Vicky and I were walking on the pebble beach at Sechelt, BC when an unusual question popped into my head.
I asked Vicky: “What would you do if the sea suddenly retreated and left all the little fishes flapping around on the tidal flats?”
Being an animal lover, Vicky said she would run around putting the fish into the remaining shallow pools of water.
I explained that this sea retreat would be immediately followed by a tsunami, and the best move is to run for high ground – the little fishes would be fine, but the people on the beach, not so much.
That evening we joined her parents to watch TV, and heard the first news of the great SE Asia tsunami that killed 250,000 people that day. Pure coincidence? A perturbation in the Force? I have no idea. Vicky just stared at me.
Anyway, I also wanted to tell you that in 2002 I (we) predicted global cooling by 2020-2030… … and our predictive track record is very good. So buy that Honda generator and bundle up. It’s going to get colder out there.
Happy Holidays to all, Allan