The Really Big One

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The Really Big One

Postby Qinglong » Tue Jul 14, 2015 5:00 pm

This is probably the scariest thing I've read all year.
New Yorker wrote: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. … 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.” In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people.
...
A grown man is knocked over by ankle-deep water moving at 6.7 miles an hour. The tsunami will be moving more than twice that fast when it arrives. Its height will vary with the contours of the coast, from twenty feet to more than a hundred feet. It will not look like a Hokusai-style wave, rising up from the surface of the sea and breaking from above. It will look like the whole ocean, elevated, overtaking land. Nor will it be made only of water—not once it reaches the shore. It will be a five-story deluge of pickup trucks and doorframes and cinder blocks and fishing boats and utility poles and everything else that once constituted the coastal towns of the Pacific Northwest.

Any TCS'ers living on the northwest coast of North America?
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Re: The Really Big One

Postby PSTN » Tue Jul 14, 2015 5:06 pm

Places to move:

Edmonton
Calgary
Vancouver
Toronto
Montreal?
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Re: The Really Big One

Postby ghijkmnop » Tue Jul 14, 2015 5:09 pm

Redacted
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Last edited by ghijkmnop on Tue Mar 19, 2019 4:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Really Big One

Postby Crimson847 » Tue Jul 14, 2015 5:14 pm

I live like a mile east of I-5, so apparently I'll be able to bike over there and then stand resolutely as the wave of destruction almost reaches me before receding.
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"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
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Re: The Really Big One

Postby Bromo » Tue Jul 14, 2015 7:26 pm

Places to move to: Oklahoma. Come over to my house, people, so we can have an End of the World party! My treat.
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Re: The Really Big One

Postby BROWNRECLUSE » Tue Jul 14, 2015 7:32 pm

ghijkmnop wrote:A quake like that would probably trigger Yellowstone.


Yay, we get to live out Cormac McCarthy's The Road!
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Re: The Really Big One

Postby PSTN » Tue Jul 14, 2015 7:48 pm

Dibs on Charlize Theron!
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Re: The Really Big One

Postby Crimson847 » Tue Jul 14, 2015 11:33 pm

Kevin_Durant wrote:Places to move to: Oklahoma. Come over to my house, people, so we can have an End of the World party! My treat.


Well, at least until tornado season comes.
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"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Re: The Really Big One

Postby iMURDAu » Wed Jul 15, 2015 1:21 am

East Coast Bias for the win please.
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Re: The Really Big One

Postby Learned Nand » Wed Jul 15, 2015 1:29 am

Well, I'm only a mile from the ocean, but am still technically east of the I-5, so I should be safe.

Image
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Re: The Really Big One

Postby Crimson847 » Wed Jul 15, 2015 1:40 am

iMURDAu wrote:East Coast Bias for the win please.


Sandy:

Image

Irene:

Image

And, most devastating of all:

Image
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"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Re: The Really Big One

Postby Crimson847 » Wed Jul 15, 2015 2:05 am

Also, it's not going to trigger Yellowstone. Earthquakes just like this one have been occurring along the Cascadia subduction zone every few hundred years for millennia. The last "really big one" occurred in 1700, and there have been 41 such events in the last 10,000 years. Meanwhile, Yellowstone hasn't had a lava flow in 70,000 years, and hasn't had a super-eruption in over 600,000 years.


EDIT: btw Aviel, I hope the location marked on that map isn't your actual address. Also, San Clemente is way too far south to be seriously affected.
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"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Re: The Really Big One

Postby ghijkmnop » Wed Jul 15, 2015 2:40 am

Redacted
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Last edited by ghijkmnop on Tue Mar 19, 2019 4:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Really Big One

Postby Learned Nand » Wed Jul 15, 2015 2:42 am

Crimson847 wrote:EDIT: btw Aviel, I hope the location marked on that map isn't your actual address. Also, San Clemente is way too far south to be seriously affected.

Most people here know my address, and the fact that nobody has stalked me is honestly kind of an insult at this point.
  • 18

Terry Pratchett wrote:The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

Click for a Limerick
OrangeEyebrows wrote:There once was a guy, Aviel,
whose arguments no one could quell.
He tested with Turing,
his circuits fried during,
and now we'll have peace for a spell.
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Re: The Really Big One

Postby PSTN » Wed Jul 15, 2015 2:50 am

aviel wrote:
Crimson847 wrote:EDIT: btw Aviel, I hope the location marked on that map isn't your actual address. Also, San Clemente is way too far south to be seriously affected.

Most people here know my address, and the fact that nobody has stalked me is honestly kind of an insult at this point.


Yes, no one is stalking you. Watching. Waiting --waiting for the perfect time to strike.
And trying to think of a way to do it so it looks like just a regular crime, not some kind of anti-Semitic hate-crime.
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