Alt news: Major CO release may signal impending quake on West Coast

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.

Take your hands and hold them palms down, middle fingertips touching. Your right hand represents the North American tectonic plate, which bears on its back, among other things, our entire continent, from One World Trade Center to the Space Needle, in Seattle. Your left hand represents an oceanic plate called Juan de Fuca, ninety thousand square miles in size. The place where they meet is the Cascadia subduction zone. Now slide your left hand under your right one. That is what the Juan de Fuca plate is doing: slipping steadily beneath North America. When you try it, your right hand will slide up your left arm, as if you were pushing up your sleeve. That is what North America is not doing. It is stuck, wedged tight against the surface of the other plate.

Without moving your hands, curl your right knuckles up, so that they point toward the ceiling. Under pressure from Juan de Fuca, the stuck edge of North America is bulging upward and compressing eastward, at the rate of, respectively, three to four millimetres and thirty to forty millimetres a year. It can do so for quite some time, because, as continent stuff goes, it is young, made of rock that is still relatively elastic. (Rocks, like us, get stiffer as they age.) But it cannot do so indefinitely. There is a backstop—the craton, that ancient unbudgeable mass at the center of the continent—and, sooner or later, North America will rebound like a spring. If, on that occasion, only the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone gives way—your first two fingers, say—the magnitude of the resulting quake will be somewhere between 8.0 and 8.6. That’s the big one. If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.

Flick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again. When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. (Watch what your fingertips do when you flatten your hand.) The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

LooseGoose wrote:I posted this a while back in a different thread.....but a good read if you like doom and gloom.

The Really Big One An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when.

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.

Take your hands and hold them palms down, middle fingertips touching. Your right hand represents the North American tectonic plate, which bears on its back, among other things, our entire continent, from One World Trade Center to the Space Needle, in Seattle. Your left hand represents an oceanic plate called Juan de Fuca, ninety thousand square miles in size. The place where they meet is the Cascadia subduction zone. Now slide your left hand under your right one. That is what the Juan de Fuca plate is doing: slipping steadily beneath North America. When you try it, your right hand will slide up your left arm, as if you were pushing up your sleeve. That is what North America is not doing. It is stuck, wedged tight against the surface of the other plate.

Without moving your hands, curl your right knuckles up, so that they point toward the ceiling. Under pressure from Juan de Fuca, the stuck edge of North America is bulging upward and compressing eastward, at the rate of, respectively, three to four millimetres and thirty to forty millimetres a year. It can do so for quite some time, because, as continent stuff goes, it is young, made of rock that is still relatively elastic. (Rocks, like us, get stiffer as they age.) But it cannot do so indefinitely. There is a backstop—the craton, that ancient unbudgeable mass at the center of the continent—and, sooner or later, North America will rebound like a spring. If, on that occasion, only the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone gives way—your first two fingers, say—the magnitude of the resulting quake will be somewhere between 8.0 and 8.6. That’s the big one. If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.

Flick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again. When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. (Watch what your fingertips do when you flatten your hand.) The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

Giant Moose wrote:I'm not worried. The East Coast is all that matters anyway.

tGreenWay wrote:Bump for OTPT. You might want to buy some property, dude. You could be sitting on some glorious coastal views.

Rocinante wrote:What the fuck is CO?

Travis of the Cosmos wrote:

tGreenWay wrote:Bump for OTPT. You might want to buy some property, dude. You could be sitting on some glorious coastal views.

Or just drowning in debt.

Get it? Drowning. Cause ocean. And natural disaster. I'm so funny. Eat shit.

Floyd Robertson wrote:No time to worry about the west coast, we have our own deathstorm coming this afternoon in the mitten.

CORNER BLITZ wrote:

Rocinante wrote:What the fuck is CO?

One carbon and one oxygen

Carbon monoxide

Rocinante wrote:

CORNER BLITZ wrote:

One carbon and one oxygen

Carbon monoxide

Bullshit.

Rocinante wrote:

CORNER BLITZ wrote:

One carbon and one oxygen

Carbon monoxide

Bullshit.

tGreenWay wrote:

Rocinante wrote:

Bullshit.

Why? And keep in mind I favored the soft sciences. All I did was pass along what I read. So please elaborate. TIA.

Rocinante wrote:

CORNER BLITZ wrote:

One carbon and one oxygen

Carbon monoxide

Bullshit.

Rocinante wrote:

tGreenWay wrote:


Why? And keep in mind I favored the soft sciences. All I did was pass along what I read. So please elaborate. TIA.

Don't you hate it when you buy a new pair of shoes and they have great tread and you walk through some gravel on the street and then the tread is just full of the gravel? Fucking sucks man.

Floyd Robertson wrote:No time to worry about the west coast, we have our own deathstorm coming this afternoon in the mitten.

tGreenWay wrote:

Floyd Robertson wrote:No time to worry about the west coast, we have our own deathstorm coming this afternoon in the mitten.

Nothing subtle about the snowfall now. It's coming straight down as if a dump truck dropped its load. You're screwed.

Rocinante wrote:No, here's my real answer.  It's bullshit because 1). there is no scientific link between increased Carbon Monoxide as an indicator of earthquakes and 2). If you look at meteorological models of the west coast right now, there is every reason to believe that increased Carbon Monoxide is from emissions.  There is a stagnant mass of air hanging over the west coast that's been there for a while.

Sorry for being a dick tGreenway.

Rocinante wrote:No, here's my real answer.  It's bullshit because 1). there is no scientific link between increased Carbon Monoxide as an indicator of earthquakes and 2). If you look at meteorological models of the west coast right now, there is every reason to believe that increased Carbon Monoxide is from emissions.  There is a stagnant mass of air hanging over the west coast that's been there for a while.

Sorry for being a dick tGreenway.

LooseGoose wrote:

Rocinante wrote:No, here's my real answer.  It's bullshit because 1). there is no scientific link between increased Carbon Monoxide as an indicator of earthquakes and 2). If you look at meteorological models of the west coast right now, there is every reason to believe that increased Carbon Monoxide is from emissions.  There is a stagnant mass of air hanging over the west coast that's been there for a while.

Sorry for being a dick tGreenway.

So we're not going to have 22 million liberals surfboarding to Japan? Fuck.

LooseGoose wrote:

Rocinante wrote:No, here's my real answer.  It's bullshit because 1). there is no scientific link between increased Carbon Monoxide as an indicator of earthquakes and 2). If you look at meteorological models of the west coast right now, there is every reason to believe that increased Carbon Monoxide is from emissions.  There is a stagnant mass of air hanging over the west coast that's been there for a while.

Sorry for being a dick tGreenway.

So we're not going to have 22 million liberals surfboarding to Japan? Fuck.

Rocinante wrote:Of course, if the big one comes tomorrow, I am denying that I said any of this stuff.

tGreenWay wrote:

Floyd Robertson wrote:No time to worry about the west coast, we have our own deathstorm coming this afternoon in the mitten.

Nothing subtle about the snowfall now. It's coming straight down as if a dump truck dropped its load. You're screwed.

Rocinante wrote:Of course, if the big one comes tomorrow, I am denying that I said any of this stuff.

Floyd Robertson wrote:

tGreenWay wrote:


Nothing subtle about the snowfall now. It's coming straight down as if a dump truck dropped its load. You're screwed.

The good news (maybe) is that I live about 30 miles south of the infamous I-69 corridor.

Maybe I'll even be able to make it home from work before it starts because so far, nothing's happening in the fair county of Macomb.

The Pantry wrote:

Floyd Robertson wrote:

The good news (maybe) is that I live about 30 miles south of the infamous I-69 corridor.

Maybe I'll even be able to make it home from work before it starts because so far, nothing's happening in the fair county of Macomb.

Saying only 1-3" here in Troy.

tGreenWay wrote:That's what she said.  

I.B. Fine wrote:

tGreenWay wrote:That's what she said.  

She told me you're always exaggerating.

Travis of the Cosmos wrote:I had nachos yesterday.