Geologist here (by training). I know HN readers are instant experts on everything, except reading the entire article I guess. All the geoengineering suggestions are amusing, but there is nothing we can do about the (hypothetical) stress buildup on the Cascadia Fault. There are lots of ways to measure stress and determine which segments of a fault are locked, this direct observation of a single seep being one very anecdotal example. We have instrumented and observed the hell out of other faults for decades, and we have increased our ability to predict earthquakes by ~0%.
I think in part this is because of a mode of discourse based on questions by assertion: I know a small factoid, I got it from IFLS, I repeat it here, there is an implicit question.
"so if we dumped 30 megatonnes of concrete over the fault we'd alter the compression ratio of the subsoils and this would stop the coming mega-quake" because I read once that big buildings alter readings on somebody's seismograph, somewhere, once.
Mind you, geologists do it by reverse: I nice one I know from U Qld told me the economic upsides of the San Diego quake were net positive. I'm not sure all economists agree!
"Economic upsides" are directly related to the values assigned. If no value is assigned to death and trauma, it's quite possible that a net positive is recorded by knocking down a bunch of old building and highways and rebuilding them.
However, if we decide to jump-start economic development by knocking down infrastructure and rebuilding it, I'd suggest we make sure buildings and freeways are empty of human beings first.
The bigger issue is that these typical “post-crisis infrastructure spending results in massive economic gains!” stories ignore the opportunity cost of spending that money on repair rather than something else.
Committing this mistake can result in very unfortunate conclusions, such as breaking windows leads to economic growth.
Didn't the Japan early warning system work pretty well? I'd say it was an improvement that wouldn't have been possible without increased abilities over the decades.
Yeah it is a cool system, but it only works well depending on your location in regards to the sensors that detect the earthquake. That determines whether you will have seconds or up to a minute of time to react. If you are closer to the epicenter than the sensors, then you will probably feel the tremors before the warning gets to you.
Fascinating stuff, and pretty serendipitous to find it based on a weather hold and a "hmm, that's weird." kind of thing. One of the things a marine biologist said to me that struck me was "There are more unexplored areas on this planet than explored, they just happen to be below water."[1]
I often wonder if there is some way to harness these things (seeps) given they often spew methane (which could power gas turbines), and have the kinetic energy in the shooting water which a water turbine could harness. If you were seasteading that might make for a good destination point where you could set up your power station on the ocean floor.[2]
But another interesting point might be to create some sort of observatory here to take measurements and correlate those with seismic activity of the fault. The next time this fault lets go it is going to do a lot of shaking and tidal waving. Any warning could be really really helpful in saving lives.
[1] This in a conversation about "What do research wildlife biologists do given how much we already know about wildlife on this planet."
"Rifters" series also has some of the most grimdark-fun & chaotic versions of the "net" that I've ever read.
I had an absolute blast with so far the first two books. Watts' mastery of psychology & neurosis & suspense is captured in an incredibly tightly confined dark scary isolated space at the bottom of the ocean. The setting here is just so exceeding. What a series (so far).
And where the AI's fail to fill the subway station with air because someone smashed the clock on the wall visible on the security cameras and no onw realized that that was what was triggering the AI to fill the room with air before the train doors opened...
Well this makes me think of personal assistants. Lots of people have their assistant email someone else's assistant to set up a meeting. If these AIs actually work properly, the scenario may not end up being terribly concerning.
Oh, sure, Watts has those, too. The problem is that in that world, the public Internet consists entirely of bots screaming at each other, and is basically unusable for anything else. Now listen to the fears about GPT spam finally rendering Google utterly useless, and tell me you don't feel the foreshocks of that future.
I do think it a little over reduces the imagery/situation, a bit. Watts' late internet has so many factors of just wrecked savage badlands, being endlessly blasted with savage e-storms. Endless bots screaming, oh yes oh yes, but also just everything under active caustic assault, all pieces of information actively being degraded, constant brownout/black outs, storms & turbulence aplenty. It's wild imagery for a hellacious information space.
Packets are like little programs sent out into the din, trying to make it through the chaos, but being injured mangled warped & hobbled at every step. Picking up all kinds of riders & viruses or just being assaulted & damaged. It's wonderfully terrible imagery.
The second book is Maelstrom, named for this howling shrieking post-internet storm. Book 2, like book 1, has, best I can tell, nothing at all like it in all existence. Amazing grimdark shit.
I... would not describe that trilogy as a fun read, though I think you were being sardonic in as much as the premises throughout are apocalyptic and nihilistic.
Whenever the CSD and the JdF fault are mentioned, I scan to see if this trilogy is mentioned, and if so, if a content warning is attached.
I have many ties thought, I would like to recommend this to people as disaster-porn,
but (not unlike Accelerando), I can't, generally,
because it is also unremittingly disturbing BDSM torture-porn.
I have wondered recently whether with the help of AI tools like Hyperwrite, one could excise that content and leave the other aspects coherent.
TLDLR if Watts isn't a hardcore devotee of BDSM, crossing over into fetishization of torture especially of women, you wouldn't know it from these novels.
A shame as the stuff about the rift itself is quite good.
I agree that the Achilles Desjardins torture porn was disturbing, but I've always interpreted it as an argument against Utilitarianism, and not BSDM porn per se. It's a more vividly disturbing version of The Ones That Walk Away From Omelas.
Watts sets up Desjardins as a Utilitarian demon, an evil that we tolerate because his specific evils are less than the overall good he provides the world.
In the end it turns out that the overall good he provided the world was a deception, and the man was revealed to have been pure villain for the entirety of books 3 and 4.
But yeah, I agree with you that I'd prefer to have not read those scenes. I'll still recommend Starfish, but not its sequels.
I am distinctly more skeptical, I find it implausible that these scenes would be given their centricity and word count and "rich detail" were they there merely a necessary evil to construct an argument or move the plot. There is no shortage of celebrated examples of literature treating the grotesque, violent, dehumanizing, painful, etc... without lingering on it. The abhorrent can be evoked without fetishization. :/
> 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.
Here's a great video by Nick Zentner, who teaches at Central Washington University, on that article and has a lot of updated info and debunks some claims made.
What kills me is the often repeated claim that some massive tsunami is going to wipe out everything up to I-5 (about 60-80 miles inland in Oregon).
Most of the analysis I've seen seems to completely ignore the existence of the Oregon coastal mountain range, a 4000 ft high mountain range a few miles inland along the entire Oregon coast (basically Astoria to Florence).
Even in the worst case scenario, maybe some coastal towns are going to have a bad day, though they are all very well outfitted with tsunami alarms and maps that basically say to go a mile or so inland, so I doubt there would even be any significant loss of life.
A large enough tsunami could travel up the Columbia a significant distance. Even a town like Rainier could be at risk though Portland should be fine.
I think the "everything west of I-5 will be toast" refers more to Seattle, where all of downtown is built on fill pulled from the Sound 100+ years ago. For everyone else, the biggest risk is being completely cut off when all of the bridges fail.
Are the claims made by the professor still accurate given that the video is seven years old and we have been hearing for years that our infrastructure hasn’t been doing so well? I guess it might not be “toast”, but I can’t imagine having to wait weeks to get emergency aid and resources.
Paleoseismology is a pretty fascinating area of study that involves Japanese tsunami records, tree ring studies, indigenous people's stories, and more to create a record of past events; sometimes with unexpected certainty. The last Cascadia event for example occurred around 9 PM or so on January 26, 1700.
You can still see tree stumps on some Oregon beaches at very low tides, which I would presume were submerged suddenly on occurrence of one of the past earthquakes. Here's an article about the "Ghost Forests" in Oregon: https://beachconnection.net/news/ghostfor010912_650.php
Is it just me or are these types of 'do this body movement' metaphors in written featues always too unclear to actually follow along.. are my hands side by side bending fingers to touch? one on top of the other?
I find they often are bad. I don't know if this was written for radio but why not include a simple diagram since we're on the internet? Or is The New Yorker too cultured for that so they can only include snide comics?
In any case I didn't think this one was the worst I have come across. Can you really put your hands side by side with palms facing downward and middle finger tips touching? And if yes, may I see it?
Nothing is bending. Imagine your right hand as South America continent, and left as North America. The middle fingers' tips are touching where both of these two continents are joined by a narrow mass of land.
> 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.”
Supposedly, the Pacific Northwest is overdue for a big quake. A lot of coastal communities in this region seem ill prepared for possible tsunamis and such that will likely result.
I hate seeing third world countries failing to develop because housing was wiped out by the latest big natural disaster, something the buildings were not constructed to withstand even though they knew it was coming. It was not a matter of if but when.
I am appalled that America seems to be doing such a poor job about similar situations. We know it's coming. We will probably be caught flat-footed anyway.
What do you recommend people do? I rock climb as much as I can, and the idea that an earthquake can happen at pretty much any time and dislodge the rock I'm attached to is pretty terrifying, but at the same time, a life lived in fear isn't a life worth living to me
What about doing the opposite of this? Like, if you can tell pressure is building up in a volcano just blow a few holes in it or around it. Preferably with nukes because I don't believe in half-assing this sort of thing.
I think the nukes are going to be a lot more dangerous than the volcano, and now we have fallout and an erupting volcano.
I've heard a suggestion that we aggressively harvest geothermal power from a volcano in order to cool it. But geothermal power can itself trigger earthquakes, and I'm not sure it's realistic we could harvest power at a rate to move the needle on cooling a volcano.
Is that really true? Fusion weapons scale well and don't have an upper limit, their primary fuel is extremely inexpensive. I'm a total idiot, but I'm not aware of any reason why humanity couldn't build a thousand mile long hydrogen 'bomb' with a gigaton yield as some kind of mega-engineering project.
Sure, and the sun is technically the biggest hydrogen bomb in our solar system. But practically we are not going to build a bomb big enough to disrupt the tectonic plates beneath us.
says a magnitude 9 earthquake is equivalent to 189 MT-tnt, so the largest atomic bomb detonated by mankind would be the energetic equivalent of an 8.6 magnitude earthquake.
But it's not really a fair comparison, since the atomic bomb is fast and probably wouldn't couple its energy into the earth particularly well compared to an earthquake.
That's mostly wrong, particularly in the context of the proposal above. Fallout comes not only from the unfissioned nuclear material of the bomb, but also from the fisson byproducts and from neutron activation of other bomb components, such as the bomb case. And with a ground burst, or worse a bomb buried deep enough to create a very large crater (the above proposal), a huge amount of fallout is created through the neutron activation of the ground itself. This is true even with extremely efficient fission-fusion-fission bombs (e.g. thermonuclear bombs which use depleted uranium tampers), which produce a massive amount of neutron radiation and a great deal of fallout from the fission of the tamper which is caused by the fusion stage.
> Volcanoes like Mount St Helens explode with huge amounts of pressure, making the added concrete a danger to health as it is easily scattered around. "The dust from concrete," YouTube channel What If notes, "would lead to fatal lung diseases and cancer."
Whereas volcanic ash and gas (released in large amounts) is safe to breathe? \s
I don’t think there’s a need to ‘plug the hole’. The article suggests that there’s hot water flowing out from under the sea bed but what’s more likely (and normal) is that there’s a fracture of exposed magma that’s heating the water at the seabed. This heated water is convecting up and mixing with the surrounding sea water, with the hot water mixed to ambient sea temperature before it hits the surface. The methane is normal from such fractures. They’re not normally permanent features and are analogous to magma flows on the surface of the earth.
The whole premise of the article and paper is that the water its self is from the plate boundary. "The seep fluid chemistry is unique for Cascadia and includes extreme enrichment of boron and lithium and depletion of chloride, potassium, and magnesium. We conclude that the fluids are sourced from pore water compaction and mineral dehydration reactions with minimum source temperatures of 150° to 250°C, placing the source at or near the plate boundary offshore Central Oregon."
I kind of agree, but OTOH I don't think I want anyone to be playing around with the limited knowledge we have. Maybe they'd inadvertently trigger the 9+ quake. Whoops.
Presumably if the water had enough pressure to punch a hole it has enough pressure to punch another. I'd wager these holes are occasionally covered by underwater landslides and the like.
I'm curious what makes you uncomfortable about it?
What makes me uncomfortable is that this shit is the lubricant for the plates, right? And I live on top of the subduction zone? This is pretty straightforward.
So you're thinking that if more lubrication stayed under ground, the plates wouldn't stick together so much, and they wouldn't store tension? (I'm not saying you're wrong, I have no idea.)
The flow rates are estimated at ~500 ml/s. That seems pretty negligible in the grand scheme of things. It really says more about our sensor data that we were even able to detect that small of a leak in a giant ocean.
It is an imperial converter, and lacks most modern American units such as Libraries of Congress. A benefit is that it has some local units: Area (nanoWales - nW), Force (Norris - No), Length (linguine - lg), Temperature (Hilton - Hn) etcetera.
By volume of the building I guess (I'm not sure if the standard LoC unit of volume has ever been clarified).
ChatGPT says (and thus it must be true!), approximately 27 Olympic swimming pools could fit inside the Library of Congress by volume. GP comment had converted to 6.3 olympic swimming pools, so that means just over 1/4 of a Library of Congress (by volume!).
The article says that (as far as they can tell) the liquid pressure helps reduce the plate friction, so leaking actually contributes to stress build up:
> Fluid released from the fault zone is like leaking lubricant, Solomon said. That’s bad news for earthquake hazards: Less lubricant means stress can build to create a damaging quake.
The fault lies where the two plates collide. This can't be redirected. At absolute best, over the course of millions of years, you could break larger plates up into smaller plates and make a bunch of smaller faults. I don't know that this would ultimately be beneficial, and I have no clue how humans could do it.
