WARNING CASCADIA SUBDUCTION ZONE TO LET GO ON 9-11-12

Thread: The 104 hour warning has gone into effect!!!

[link to seattletimes.com]

[link to tdn.com]

Hurricane Sandy was indeed a Frankenstorm, a monster that lived up to its hyperbolic nickname. Millions lost power. Dozens lost their lives. It will take weeks to get the region fully up and running again. Entire swaths of the Eastern Seaboard are forever changed.

But Sandy is a lightweight compared with the natural disaster that has been brewing for the past 300 years on the other side of the country. Here, at the joinder of two massive tectonic plates some 50 to 70 miles from the Pacific shoreline, lies a fleet of Frankenstorms—an army of monsters.
[link to www.thedailybeast.com]

This disaster will strike without the days of warning East Coast residents had, without breathless weather forecasters and Doppler radar, without all that time to stock up on candles and bottled water, without functioning roads to drive from homes perched precariously on oceanfront cliffs to some safe inland respite. This disaster will come in a flash, and geologists say it will be nothing like the United States has ever seen.


“It’ll be like having three or four Katrinas, at once, spread up and down the coast,” says Chris Goldfinger, director of the Active Tectonics and Seafloor Mapping Lab at Oregon State University
[link to www.thedailybeast.com]

The Cascadia Subduction Zone is the wonky name for the place where all this mayhem will begin. That zone is a fault line, a crease in the planet floor between the North American plate and the Continental plate. This fault line is 600 miles long, and that length is why it’s so dangerous. The plates are locked tight against each other, but they’re not static. They’re pushing, with all the might of the same geological forces that cause continental drift.


And one day, they’ll slip.


Just a little. But because these plates are so long and so tightly locked, that shift will unleash a massive earthquake, of magnitude 9.0 or greater.


Understand what a magnitude-9.0 earthquake is. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that struck the San Francisco Bay Area—causing 57 deaths, plus the collapse of a section of the Cypress Street Viaduct and another portion of the Bay Bridge—was a 6.9. The Sumatra quake, which killed hundreds of thousands of people Indonesia, was an 8.8. The Cascadia Subduction Zone could rattle at 9.0, or 9.5, and the difference between those numbers isn’t a small thing, Goldfinger explains. Each tenth of a point on the Richter scale represents a 50 percent increase in seismic power.


“By the time you get from an 8 to a 9, you’re about 32 times the energy,” he told The Daily Beast.


A quake that scale would be the largest ever recorded in the U.S., as powerful as the 9.0 that hit Japan last March, the strongest temblor that country had ever seen. It will shake bridges so fiercely and for such a long time—five or 10 minutes, perhaps—that the roads people think they’ll use to evacuate will crumple. The bridges that cross coastal rivers, that fire trucks and ambulances use to get from one side of town to the next, will tumble into the water. Electricity? Nowhere.


But the big population centers in the Pacific Northwest, they’re fine, right? They’re far enough away from the fault line to barely feel the quake? Wrong. Portland, Seattle, and cities north and south are all close enough to this fault to lose at least their older, unreinforced masonry buildings, the ones not upgraded to current-day seismic standards, Goldfinger says. Buildings full of people.


“It will put Portland and Seattle out of action potentially for years,” he says.


And that’s just the earthquake. Next up, in the Mother of All Disasters trifecta, another deadly piece of jargon: liquefaction. That’s when the earth shakes the sandy substrate beneath houses and fire stations and hospitals all along the coast so vigorously that the soil mixes with the high-water table beneath it, turning the ground into quicksand. So what didn’t get shaken into pieces gets swallowed up by the earth, at least in some places.


Then comes Cascadia’s final blow: the tsunami. Waves traveling at jetliner speeds across the open ocean, barely higher than the surface of the water far off shore but soaring up into the sky, 100 feet or higher, once they approach land.


[link to www.thedailybeast.com]

Your Fault: Handy tips on surviving the next earthquake

November 05, 2012 | 5:02 pm | By April Alayon, Earthquakes, Gary Lim


Our humble little province was hit with a 7.7 magnitude quake off the coast of the Haida Gwai last week, and while there were no reported causalities or injurie,s a 7.7 quake is still nothing to sneeze at, particularly if you don’t want your nose ripped off your face and shoved down your left bronchus by the cold, unfeeling pincers of Mother Nature. Fortunately though, this particular quake happened pretty much in the middle of nowhere, and caused no significant damage.

Unfortunately, this might be neither the worst nor the end of it. If you’ve paid any attention in your high school’s earth science or geography classes, you were probably a nerd — and not the billionaire-at-27 kind of nerd neither — anyways, if you did, you would’ve learnt that Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland, and in fact pretty much the entire northwest coast is situated on top of something called Cascadia Subduction Zone.

This leaves our fragile little cities prone to mega thrust earthquakes (Not to be confused with mega thrust girthquakes, that’s something completely different but equally serious). These are the kind of quakes that rip apart cities and turn skylines into scrapheaps.

Anyways, the seismologists at The Peak (Your student levy at work, people!) have come up with some essential earthquake preparedness tips.


[link to www.the-peak.ca]

QUAKES BY MAG...

0

Not an earthquake. It’s a zero, why did you even bother to check the scale?

1

Might be an earthquake, or you might have just gotten a text. Check your phone.

2

Vibrations not as bad as the people who won’t stop asking if ™anyone else felt that?∫

3

Should be possible to counteract the effects by jumping at right moments.

4

Okay to disregard ™Shake well before opening∫ instructions.

5

A typical day in the life of a Chihuahua.

6

National Museum of Etch A Sketchˇ Art destroyed.

7

Panics breaks out as a shortage of doorways to stand in becomes apparent.

8

Sound of maracas, tambourines and sleigh bells emanating from music stores deafening.

9

™Hey honey, has the sky always been upside-down like that? Honey?

10

Vengeful god is actively trying to restart the universe. Only blood sacrifice will appease him now.

9/11?

9TH DAY 11TH MONTH

In the USA we go month, day, year--that's why there was confusion.

ya but 9/11 sounds more like a conspiracy

What you put together is pretty fearful and doomy. 5 or 10 minutes. That seems like an awful long time for a earthquake to last. Usally its only seconds to a couple minutes tops.

The San Andres always thought to be a seperate Fault has now been added to the Cascadia Fault. They discovered they are joined and California has alot of sister faults also that intersect.

The New Madrid even with these too combined still gets the prise. Its huge. Encompasses almost 12 States along the East Coast and Inland all the way to the tip of the great lakes. It will split the USA in half if it ever goes.

yup....going to be crazy when Cascadia goes....

it should shake the continent and set off the New Madrid, we all know Madrid is full of gASSHOLES and sTINKHOLES...

welcome to the new NORTH AMERICA

November means 9

not in Canada 9th day 11th month...

but for you I will revise it to....

WARNING CASCADIA SUBDUCTION ZONE TO LET GO ON 11-9-12

not in Canada 9th day 11th month...

but for you I will revise it to....

WARNING CASCADIA SUBDUCTION ZONE TO LET GO ON 11-9-12

Pretty doomy don't you think OP? There is no doubt that this fault is gonna give some day. But what are the signs of it happening so soon?

This is the reason I would never live in an older style brick building or even work inside one though.

Op:

You are a fearmongering idiot.

i called it on the 11th but sure why not. a little preparation goes a long way. good luck everyone. 6.4 on the juan de fuca plate last night. no bueno.
oh ya, and the base has had none stop -I MEAN NON STOP- traffic for a few days now... a little out of the ordinary. just sayin.

Hey How is the situation down there? I already moved all my belongings into my truck and I am living on the mountains right now. Are there huge floods and earthquakes???