2012-1-11

Cascadia Mega-Fault Due to Rupture

…sometime in the next 500 years, according to a great blog a couple weeks back by the PSSN’s John Vidale, a regular contributor to their “Seismo Blog” How likely is it to go? Well you’ll have to read his blog that breaks down some of the inputs to evaluating the actual risk factor – which I think he never actually stated…

Do you know Washington’s four kinds of earthquake sources?

Cascadia Subduction Zone
Example: the 1700 earthquake that caused shaking and a tsunami that inundated the Oregon coast and reached as far as Japan.

New Fault Lines Revealed in Washington State

Two new articles from the Homeland Security Newswire and the Yakima Herald discuss new fault lines (maybe better described as extended and remapped fault lines) that the U.S. Geological Survey’s Brian Sherrod has been studying. It is too early to not consequences for these and the discovery doesn’t inherently up the likelihood for quakes, but will make future predictions more accurate and does expand our understanding of the mechanisms at work underground – where real faults are much more complex than simple two dimensional lines on a map. Click on the map to the right to see several views of the newly unveiled faults.

Global Warming Moves us Closer to the Ultimate Disaster

Doomsday clock moves closer to midnight

Numerous articles (including USA Today’s) note that scientists have moved the hands of the doomsday clock toward midnight – as a visible metaphor for our lessened security due to our fuelish ways.  It is notoriously hard to change our social (i.e., automotive) ways, but the consequences of our not taking a long term view are increasingly resulting in massive storm and economic damage today to societies across the globe.

DHS-- Fusion Centers & EOCs Need to Talk

According to the inspector general (IG) of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), state and local fusion centers and emergency operations centers could improve the response of their jurisdictions to terrorism and natural disasters if they talked to each other more often. Many fusion centers and EOCs surveyed do not exchange information.