Sorry to post a reddit link, but that's where I found this posted. Holy crap! Keep your eye on the background, not the foreground. Well, arguably some of that "back" ground becomes the "fore"...
Sorry to post a reddit link, but that's where I found this posted. Holy crap!
Keep your eye on the background, not the foreground. Well, arguably some of that "back" ground becomes the "fore" ground…
I've lived in tornado and hurricane country. I've dealt with hail and wind. But I always count on the earth being, y'know, the earth. Earthquakes terrify me. I feel like at least with weather, you have an idea that stuff might be coming.
Btw, just skip between 0:09 and 0:12. Mesmerizing. The cracks in the driveway/pavement just as it shifts is sublime as well. I grew up in California, felt a few when I was there. (Also got to feel...
Btw, just skip between 0:09 and 0:12. Mesmerizing. The cracks in the driveway/pavement just as it shifts is sublime as well.
I grew up in California, felt a few when I was there. (Also got to feel the NJ one last year from Boston!)
This is soooo cool to me; honestly I'd take it over a hurricane (though I only experienced one [Harvey] that had a ton of rain but "little" wind), and way more than a tornado. I've seen too many tornado movies and wrecked trailer parks. Only have seen the Loma Prieta and Northridge effects nearby in my lifetime (that is, they affected areas I was familiar with, and had family in the regions as well). End results are scary, but tornadoes and hurricanes are way more prevalent.
I'm the opposite. Grew up with hurricanes, yet never experienced an earthquake. So earthquakes terrify me way more than hurricanes do. And I'll justify that by saying that hurricanes (typically)...
I'm the opposite. Grew up with hurricanes, yet never experienced an earthquake. So earthquakes terrify me way more than hurricanes do. And I'll justify that by saying that hurricanes (typically) aren't all that deadly, whereas the death toll for earthquakes can and regularly do get into the thousands and even tens of thousands! Like this one in the video and the recent one in Turkey as well. Hurricanes do a lot of property damage, for sure, but the death counts are usually in the single or double figures, even for major ones. The exception, of course, being whenever large amounts of water is involved. Like Katrina where a levee broke. Or the Galveston Hurricane 100+ years ago where the storm surge wiped out a coastal town.
Both of these types of disasters suck, but I feel like my chances of surviving a hurricane are a lot higher, especially with all the warning that usually comes with them.
Tornadoes are a different beast though, and unlike hurricanes they usually appear out of the blue, but at least their scope is more concentrated. The terrifying thing about earthquakes (besides the unpredictability) is just how far-reaching the effects/damages/danger extends. Like entire towns and cities leveled in the span of a few seconds/minutes. Crazy!
Tornadoes scare me. Seriously. They're like earthquakes except whilst you may have a little notice (some major earthquake are preceded by tremors/small earthquakes, but you never really know), the...
Tornadoes scare me. Seriously. They're like earthquakes except whilst you may have a little notice (some major earthquake are preceded by tremors/small earthquakes, but you never really know), the damage per tornado vs damage per earthquake ratio is WAY higher.
You can get a lot of warning for tornadoes if you keep an eye out on https://www.spc.noaa.gov/ — that'll give you an idea of the relative risk of severe weather for you. If there's a tornado risk...
You can get a lot of warning for tornadoes if you keep an eye out on https://www.spc.noaa.gov/ — that'll give you an idea of the relative risk of severe weather for you. If there's a tornado risk and you're able to monitor weather radar, there's several ways to keep yourself informed. Watching the system as it moves closer to see what's popping up is important, as well as being able to read the velocity radar.
If you have any interest, I'd be glad to try and help you with this. I'm not a meteorologist, but I am a severe weather enthusiast. And while I pay for RadarScope, it's mostly for various convenience and resolution factors; there are free resources that work just fine.
Nope, but thank you. I live in a mostly tornado-free zone, and partly that for a reason (I am fortunate enough to have been able to choose where I live). I know there are warnings, and that's...
Nope, but thank you. I live in a mostly tornado-free zone, and partly that for a reason (I am fortunate enough to have been able to choose where I live).
I know there are warnings, and that's another thing that helped instilled the fear: being caught on in a traffic jam on a freeway, hearing the sirens blaring and pretty sure I'd see a funnel cloud at any moment, with my friends commenting "oh, if it gets bad, we'll jump into the [hopefully] dry ditch on the side of the road."
Yeah I was watching the pavement thinking, on that's not too bad It's also not how much it moved but how quickly as well. This is why we moved out of Vancouver....if property is cheap enough that...
Yeah I was watching the pavement thinking, on that's not too bad
It's also not how much it moved but how quickly as well.
This is why we moved out of Vancouver....if property is cheap enough that we could afford to lose a home and start over, maybe the risk is small enough to not care. But you can't sell me a million dollar townhouse that's going to fold into liquifacted sand.
I’ve always felt more threatened by tsunamis, hurricanes, and wildfires than earthquakes! (not to add more concerns to your list) For the most part, my understanding is that even very powerful...
I’ve always felt more threatened by tsunamis, hurricanes, and wildfires than earthquakes! (not to add more concerns to your list)
For the most part, my understanding is that even very powerful earthquakes just shake your typical single family house: if it’s been built to code (and no one has torn out a shear wall during a reno), it only needs an inspection afterwards and you’re good to go. Taller or more rigid structures (eg concrete) need more technologies and inspections after a quake — see the damping systems installed in Japanese skyscrapers, for example — but they’re also pretty safe these days.
The main concerns aren’t from the earthquake itself, but all the side effects of the shaking: does your building have natural gas lines? It’s now leaking natural gas. Did you remember to install the anchors which came with your IKEA bookshelf? You now have a new IKEA table; hope it didn’t hit you on the way down. Have you/your uphill neighbour been building non-engineered retaining walls? Get ready for a large landscaping bill.
And we do often know that an earthquake is coming, it’s just that it’s always around the corner :3 perhaps that’s not as useful, though …
No, an earthquake is far worse than hurricane and wildfires. (I'll begrudgingly give you Tsunami's, but they're besties with Earthquakes so we might get a two-for-one) Do you enjoy indoor water...
No, an earthquake is far worse than hurricane and wildfires. (I'll begrudgingly give you Tsunami's, but they're besties with Earthquakes so we might get a two-for-one)
Do you enjoy indoor water and indoor plumbing ? They're gone now, and poop filled your home, enjoy no power and diseases for the next weeks. Do you drive and or use public transit and roads, and do your local grocery and restaurants rely on roads? They're also gone now, rescue via air only and the ports are gone.
Just like hurricanes, it isn't that the wind blows but what the wind is blowing ---> it isn't that the ground under your one house or building shakes, but that it's shearing against the next part of the land that your land is connected to. Think of all those little roads and houses on a Catan board, and now shuffle all the tiles: who's still got the longest road, and what resources are left for your once prosperous towns?
Huh! I was under the impression that most of the damage from earthquakes occurred due to insufficient lateral load capacity in structures, or else, infrastructure that isn’t designed to be shaken...
[…] it isn't that the ground under your one house or building shakes, but that it's shearing against the next part of the land that your land is connected to. Think of all those little roads and houses on a Catan board, and now shuffle all the tiles: who's still got the longest road, and what resources are left for your once prosperous towns?
Huh! I was under the impression that most of the damage from earthquakes occurred due to insufficient lateral load capacity in structures, or else, infrastructure that isn’t designed to be shaken being shook. That was why I thought Californians had all their retrofits: they needed to bolt houses to their foundations (so they don’t jump off) and brace their walls (so they don’t rack and collapse).
Differential land movement should only happen along the fault, I thought? And it seems like you’d need a strike-slip fault to get the sort of issue that you’re referring to.
Do you enjoy indoor water and indoor plumbing ? They're gone now, and poop filled your home, enjoy no power and diseases for the next weeks. Do you drive and or use public transit and roads, and do your local grocery and restaurants rely on roads? They're also gone now, rescue via air only and the ports are gone.
That sounds like a problem with most natural disasters too, though? Eg we saw with North Carolina that roads would wash out, houses would collapse, etc. and don’t get me started with wildfires! We’ve seen entire towns get burned to their foundations these days; forget even having a roof over your head. It’s scary stuff!
But agreed re. tsunamis. Screw em XD
edit: oh btw you might appreciate this video of an underwater earthquake. It’s similar to the one OP linked, but instead of being at the fault line, they’re just over some random crust, so the whole place moves in unison.
That sounds like hurricanes I know. Stormwater systems cannot handle the influx of water and sewage backs up. And with loss of power you get the same effect as hurricanes. And the best part is...
Do you enjoy indoor water and indoor plumbing ? They're gone now, and poop filled your home, enjoy no power and diseases for the next weeks. Do you drive and or use public transit and roads, and do your local grocery and restaurants rely on roads? They're also gone now, rescue via air only and the ports are gone.
That sounds like hurricanes I know. Stormwater systems cannot handle the influx of water and sewage backs up. And with loss of power you get the same effect as hurricanes. And the best part is typically earthquakes do not hit majorly populated areas. So the wonky effects are usually pretty rare. Fukushima was the last one I remember seeing severe shifting, and that's also why this video is so amazing. We've had surveillance cams for decades now, but we're only capturing the significant shifting now, and in a pretty remote-looking area? ... Sign me up for earthquakes over tornadoes and hurricanes any day!
Funny you ask — I ran across some discussion on this that basically sums up to: It depends. Some systems try and basically peg things to coordinates based on the larger earth, in which case the...
Funny you ask — I ran across some discussion on this that basically sums up to: It depends.
Some systems try and basically peg things to coordinates based on the larger earth, in which case the borders theoretically don't change. Some systems try and basically peg things to more local references, like how some state borders are "The middle of this river" type of thing. Those will tend to update.
In practice, when this has happened, it has largely depended more on just the interpretation the courts have given on it. I don't thnk it has been enough one way or the other to be a trend.
That said, either way, if the various land owners are taking care of the land, adverse possession laws seem to apply, i.e. like 20 years after something like this happens, legally the land borders might be based on what the people were actually losing, meaning some might gain a little land; others might lose; or just be shifted slightly.
We had to deal with that when our property in Hawaii was inundated with lava in the 2018 flow from Kilauea. Our property is now buried under 75 feet of lava so the question was, do we still own...
We had to deal with that when our property in Hawaii was inundated with lava in the 2018 flow from Kilauea. Our property is now buried under 75 feet of lava so the question was, do we still own it? Apparently we do, its just much taller and much uglier than it used to be. We'd have to use GPS to find the corners of the lot again but its still there. Its not habitable in its current condition though, so the question is moot for now.
More interesting were the residents who owned ocean front lots because the flow not only covered their lots but also kept going into the ocean, creating almost 900 acres of new land. In those cases however, the state of Hawaii now owns that new land. So they had ocean front property, now they have inland property with the state owning the ocean front property.
Dang, are the ex-oceanfront at least 75' elevated though? With a good incline they can still sea* the ocean. '* was typo but I'll leave it So sorry you guys lost your (building) property to lava.
Dang, are the ex-oceanfront at least 75' elevated though? With a good incline they can still sea* the ocean.
'* was typo but I'll leave it
So sorry you guys lost your (building) property to lava.
They are likely elevated but not 75' as the lava slopes down quite a bit more by the time it gets to the ocean. Ours was higher because we're still about 2.5 miles inland. This video was taken...
They are likely elevated but not 75' as the lava slopes down quite a bit more by the time it gets to the ocean. Ours was higher because we're still about 2.5 miles inland.
This is interesting from two, ahem, dimensions for me. From the first, are gps coordinates appropriate for determining boundaries? It may be a law in HI that says so, but most property...
This is interesting from two, ahem, dimensions for me. From the first, are gps coordinates appropriate for determining boundaries? It may be a law in HI that says so, but most property demarcations were made before gps was available. There’s interesting law and discussions about how to delineate property when landmarks shift. For example, when a river marks the boundary line, and that river shifts, does the river continue to mark the line, or where the river was? What happens when a marker disappears (some boundaries are marked by things like trees)?
Two, whether your property is marked by gps or landmarks (that haven’t shifted), you now own title to a larger piece of land, because it is now further from the center of the earth. That means you have a land on an expanded sphere, but where the corners are on rays that go down to the center of the earth.
What's really terrifying about this is that on the scale that these forces operate at, this is an imperceptibly small movement. A strain built up inside the earth for millions of years until it...
What's really terrifying about this is that on the scale that these forces operate at, this is an imperceptibly small movement. A strain built up inside the earth for millions of years until it was forceful enough to shift a section of miles-thick solid rock crust, yet it was merciful enough to only shift our puny human-habitable surface by a few metres. If we lived in tunnels a mile down this would probably be apocalyptic.
This also isn't anywhere near as bad as it can get. This was Magnitude 7.7 or so and averaged 3m of slip along a 500km fault.[1] The last Cascadia megathrust quake in 1700, the type that we know...
Exemplary
This also isn't anywhere near as bad as it can get. This was Magnitude 7.7 or so and averaged 3m of slip along a 500km fault.[1] The last Cascadia megathrust quake in 1700, the type that we know happen in the Pacific Northwest every 500 years or so, is estimated at Magnitude 9 (10x stronger, it's a log scale), averaging 20 meters of slip over more than a thousand kilometers![2]
Just looked it up and What. The. Fuck. An Earthquake in the NW United States that caused a tsunami in Japan... Imagine living anywhere on the West Coast during something like that. The sounds you...
Cascadia megathrust quake in 1700
Just looked it up and What. The. Fuck.
An Earthquake in the NW United States that caused a tsunami in Japan...
Imagine living anywhere on the West Coast during something like that. The sounds you would have heard and the movement you would have felt. The indigenous populations that lived in those areas probably have some amazing stories in their oral histories. "Yeah sure grandpa, the whole world shook and waves as tall as a mountain hit our shores. Whatever you say old man..."
I have now. That was A) incredibly detailed B) very well-written and C) horrifying. I took a disasters in history class in grad school and it's probably my favorite class I've ever taken (though a...
I have now.
That was A) incredibly detailed B) very well-written and C) horrifying.
I took a disasters in history class in grad school and it's probably my favorite class I've ever taken (though a bit morbid). These sorts of events are just so mind-boggling to try and wrap our heads around. To think that they actually happened is insane to me. Events like that 1700 earthquake, the Mt. Tambora eruption (which was heard over 2,000 miles away!), Vesuvius destroying Pompeii, the Great Lisbon Earthquake, and countless others are just so powerful and destructive that it's hard not to feel insignificant compared to the forces that the earth is capable of putting out. A few minutes or hours and your entire town/city/region is just gone. Thousands of lives lost. Breathtaking in the worst possible way.
Nature is awesome, both in the good sense and the bad. Even if we've developed the means to destroy ourselves, if nature had a will it could wipe us out in an instant. Here in the Netherlands...
Nature is awesome, both in the good sense and the bad. Even if we've developed the means to destroy ourselves, if nature had a will it could wipe us out in an instant. Here in the Netherlands we've had many floods. One basically split our country in two, compare this one to this one.
That's what led to the whole reclamation of land, and remains a core part of our identity. And it's not even been a millenia yet since that particular storm came around (12th century, if memory serves correctly).
Here's a link to the video on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OeLRK0rkCE
Video description includes the apparent source (on Facebook)
Sorry to post a reddit link, but that's where I found this posted. Holy crap!
Keep your eye on the background, not the foreground. Well, arguably some of that "back" ground becomes the "fore" ground…
I've lived in tornado and hurricane country. I've dealt with hail and wind. But I always count on the earth being, y'know, the earth. Earthquakes terrify me. I feel like at least with weather, you have an idea that stuff might be coming.
Btw, just skip between 0:09 and 0:12. Mesmerizing. The cracks in the driveway/pavement just as it shifts is sublime as well.
I grew up in California, felt a few when I was there. (Also got to feel the NJ one last year from Boston!)
This is soooo cool to me; honestly I'd take it over a hurricane (though I only experienced one [Harvey] that had a ton of rain but "little" wind), and way more than a tornado. I've seen too many tornado movies and wrecked trailer parks. Only have seen the Loma Prieta and Northridge effects nearby in my lifetime (that is, they affected areas I was familiar with, and had family in the regions as well). End results are scary, but tornadoes and hurricanes are way more prevalent.
I'm the opposite. Grew up with hurricanes, yet never experienced an earthquake. So earthquakes terrify me way more than hurricanes do. And I'll justify that by saying that hurricanes (typically) aren't all that deadly, whereas the death toll for earthquakes can and regularly do get into the thousands and even tens of thousands! Like this one in the video and the recent one in Turkey as well. Hurricanes do a lot of property damage, for sure, but the death counts are usually in the single or double figures, even for major ones. The exception, of course, being whenever large amounts of water is involved. Like Katrina where a levee broke. Or the Galveston Hurricane 100+ years ago where the storm surge wiped out a coastal town.
Both of these types of disasters suck, but I feel like my chances of surviving a hurricane are a lot higher, especially with all the warning that usually comes with them.
Tornadoes are a different beast though, and unlike hurricanes they usually appear out of the blue, but at least their scope is more concentrated. The terrifying thing about earthquakes (besides the unpredictability) is just how far-reaching the effects/damages/danger extends. Like entire towns and cities leveled in the span of a few seconds/minutes. Crazy!
Tornadoes scare me. Seriously. They're like earthquakes except whilst you may have a little notice (some major earthquake are preceded by tremors/small earthquakes, but you never really know), the damage per tornado vs damage per earthquake ratio is WAY higher.
You can get a lot of warning for tornadoes if you keep an eye out on https://www.spc.noaa.gov/ — that'll give you an idea of the relative risk of severe weather for you. If there's a tornado risk and you're able to monitor weather radar, there's several ways to keep yourself informed. Watching the system as it moves closer to see what's popping up is important, as well as being able to read the velocity radar.
If you have any interest, I'd be glad to try and help you with this. I'm not a meteorologist, but I am a severe weather enthusiast. And while I pay for RadarScope, it's mostly for various convenience and resolution factors; there are free resources that work just fine.
Nope, but thank you. I live in a mostly tornado-free zone, and partly that for a reason (I am fortunate enough to have been able to choose where I live).
I know there are warnings, and that's another thing that helped instilled the fear: being caught on in a traffic jam on a freeway, hearing the sirens blaring and pretty sure I'd see a funnel cloud at any moment, with my friends commenting "oh, if it gets bad, we'll jump into the [hopefully] dry ditch on the side of the road."
Nope, nope, nope.
Yeah I was watching the pavement thinking, on that's not too bad
It's also not how much it moved but how quickly as well.
This is why we moved out of Vancouver....if property is cheap enough that we could afford to lose a home and start over, maybe the risk is small enough to not care. But you can't sell me a million dollar townhouse that's going to fold into liquifacted sand.
I’ve always felt more threatened by tsunamis, hurricanes, and wildfires than earthquakes! (not to add more concerns to your list)
For the most part, my understanding is that even very powerful earthquakes just shake your typical single family house: if it’s been built to code (and no one has torn out a shear wall during a reno), it only needs an inspection afterwards and you’re good to go. Taller or more rigid structures (eg concrete) need more technologies and inspections after a quake — see the damping systems installed in Japanese skyscrapers, for example — but they’re also pretty safe these days.
The main concerns aren’t from the earthquake itself, but all the side effects of the shaking: does your building have natural gas lines? It’s now leaking natural gas. Did you remember to install the anchors which came with your IKEA bookshelf? You now have a new IKEA table; hope it didn’t hit you on the way down. Have you/your uphill neighbour been building non-engineered retaining walls? Get ready for a large landscaping bill.
And we do often know that an earthquake is coming, it’s just that it’s always around the corner :3 perhaps that’s not as useful, though …
No, an earthquake is far worse than hurricane and wildfires. (I'll begrudgingly give you Tsunami's, but they're besties with Earthquakes so we might get a two-for-one)
Do you enjoy indoor water and indoor plumbing ? They're gone now, and poop filled your home, enjoy no power and diseases for the next weeks. Do you drive and or use public transit and roads, and do your local grocery and restaurants rely on roads? They're also gone now, rescue via air only and the ports are gone.
Just like hurricanes, it isn't that the wind blows but what the wind is blowing ---> it isn't that the ground under your one house or building shakes, but that it's shearing against the next part of the land that your land is connected to. Think of all those little roads and houses on a Catan board, and now shuffle all the tiles: who's still got the longest road, and what resources are left for your once prosperous towns?
Huh! I was under the impression that most of the damage from earthquakes occurred due to insufficient lateral load capacity in structures, or else, infrastructure that isn’t designed to be shaken being shook. That was why I thought Californians had all their retrofits: they needed to bolt houses to their foundations (so they don’t jump off) and brace their walls (so they don’t rack and collapse).
Differential land movement should only happen along the fault, I thought? And it seems like you’d need a strike-slip fault to get the sort of issue that you’re referring to.
That sounds like a problem with most natural disasters too, though? Eg we saw with North Carolina that roads would wash out, houses would collapse, etc. and don’t get me started with wildfires! We’ve seen entire towns get burned to their foundations these days; forget even having a roof over your head. It’s scary stuff!
But agreed re. tsunamis. Screw em XD
edit: oh btw you might appreciate this video of an underwater earthquake. It’s similar to the one OP linked, but instead of being at the fault line, they’re just over some random crust, so the whole place moves in unison.
That sounds like hurricanes I know. Stormwater systems cannot handle the influx of water and sewage backs up. And with loss of power you get the same effect as hurricanes. And the best part is typically earthquakes do not hit majorly populated areas. So the wonky effects are usually pretty rare. Fukushima was the last one I remember seeing severe shifting, and that's also why this video is so amazing. We've had surveillance cams for decades now, but we're only capturing the significant shifting now, and in a pretty remote-looking area? ... Sign me up for earthquakes over tornadoes and hurricanes any day!
Yeah at the end of the day we're delicate squishy creatures with lots of needs in an occasionally violent landscape.
That shack in the background really got stretched out a bit huh? :D
How do property lines work when property rearranges itself?
Funny you ask — I ran across some discussion on this that basically sums up to: It depends.
Some systems try and basically peg things to coordinates based on the larger earth, in which case the borders theoretically don't change. Some systems try and basically peg things to more local references, like how some state borders are "The middle of this river" type of thing. Those will tend to update.
In practice, when this has happened, it has largely depended more on just the interpretation the courts have given on it. I don't thnk it has been enough one way or the other to be a trend.
That said, either way, if the various land owners are taking care of the land, adverse possession laws seem to apply, i.e. like 20 years after something like this happens, legally the land borders might be based on what the people were actually losing, meaning some might gain a little land; others might lose; or just be shifted slightly.
I'm beginning to formulate an... unorthodox strategy for investing in land.
There's a very deep rabbit hole for adverse possession of land which overlaps a bit with sovereign citizenry.
We had to deal with that when our property in Hawaii was inundated with lava in the 2018 flow from Kilauea. Our property is now buried under 75 feet of lava so the question was, do we still own it? Apparently we do, its just much taller and much uglier than it used to be. We'd have to use GPS to find the corners of the lot again but its still there. Its not habitable in its current condition though, so the question is moot for now.
More interesting were the residents who owned ocean front lots because the flow not only covered their lots but also kept going into the ocean, creating almost 900 acres of new land. In those cases however, the state of Hawaii now owns that new land. So they had ocean front property, now they have inland property with the state owning the ocean front property.
Dang, are the ex-oceanfront at least 75' elevated though? With a good incline they can still sea* the ocean.
'* was typo but I'll leave it
So sorry you guys lost your (building) property to lava.
They are likely elevated but not 75' as the lava slopes down quite a bit more by the time it gets to the ocean. Ours was higher because we're still about 2.5 miles inland.
This video was taken just a few hundred feet from our property. Gives you an idea how much lava was coming down the mountain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Do67aOUwkE&ab_channel=Star-Advertiser
This is interesting from two, ahem, dimensions for me. From the first, are gps coordinates appropriate for determining boundaries? It may be a law in HI that says so, but most property demarcations were made before gps was available. There’s interesting law and discussions about how to delineate property when landmarks shift. For example, when a river marks the boundary line, and that river shifts, does the river continue to mark the line, or where the river was? What happens when a marker disappears (some boundaries are marked by things like trees)?
Two, whether your property is marked by gps or landmarks (that haven’t shifted), you now own title to a larger piece of land, because it is now further from the center of the earth. That means you have a land on an expanded sphere, but where the corners are on rays that go down to the center of the earth.
What's really terrifying about this is that on the scale that these forces operate at, this is an imperceptibly small movement. A strain built up inside the earth for millions of years until it was forceful enough to shift a section of miles-thick solid rock crust, yet it was merciful enough to only shift our puny human-habitable surface by a few metres. If we lived in tunnels a mile down this would probably be apocalyptic.
This also isn't anywhere near as bad as it can get. This was Magnitude 7.7 or so and averaged 3m of slip along a 500km fault.[1] The last Cascadia megathrust quake in 1700, the type that we know happen in the Pacific Northwest every 500 years or so, is estimated at Magnitude 9 (10x stronger, it's a log scale), averaging 20 meters of slip over more than a thousand kilometers![2]
Just looked it up and What. The. Fuck.
An Earthquake in the NW United States that caused a tsunami in Japan...
Imagine living anywhere on the West Coast during something like that. The sounds you would have heard and the movement you would have felt. The indigenous populations that lived in those areas probably have some amazing stories in their oral histories. "Yeah sure grandpa, the whole world shook and waves as tall as a mountain hit our shores. Whatever you say old man..."
Have....you read The Really Big One (New Yorker, 2015)?
I have now.
That was A) incredibly detailed B) very well-written and C) horrifying.
I took a disasters in history class in grad school and it's probably my favorite class I've ever taken (though a bit morbid). These sorts of events are just so mind-boggling to try and wrap our heads around. To think that they actually happened is insane to me. Events like that 1700 earthquake, the Mt. Tambora eruption (which was heard over 2,000 miles away!), Vesuvius destroying Pompeii, the Great Lisbon Earthquake, and countless others are just so powerful and destructive that it's hard not to feel insignificant compared to the forces that the earth is capable of putting out. A few minutes or hours and your entire town/city/region is just gone. Thousands of lives lost. Breathtaking in the worst possible way.
Nature is awesome, both in the good sense and the bad. Even if we've developed the means to destroy ourselves, if nature had a will it could wipe us out in an instant. Here in the Netherlands we've had many floods. One basically split our country in two, compare this one to this one.
That's what led to the whole reclamation of land, and remains a core part of our identity. And it's not even been a millenia yet since that particular storm came around (12th century, if memory serves correctly).
Damn!! That's insane to see! Not sure what else to say but nature is bad ass.