Starting in the mid-80s, geologists began looking into some odd clues around the Pacific Northwest. Clues like ghost forests, these swaths of dead cedar trees along the coast that died for no apparent reason. Researchers from Oregon State starting taking sediment cores well out into the Pacific and found weird periodic layers of stuff. Turns out, they were landslides from the continental shelf. Big ones.
As recently as the '90s, Oregon thought of itself, weirdly, as being non-seismic. I mean, the Ring of Fire is distinctly ring-ish. And the Cascade Mountains have to come from somewhere, right? Well, okay, about 50 miles off the coast, stretching from Cape Mendocino in California to well past Vancouver Island in Canada, lies the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The CSZ is where the last remnants of the Juan de Fuca plate are being shoved under the (very slow-moving) bus that is the North American plate. It's a hell of a thing. Try this at home: take a 10-mile thick slab of rock, all studded with boulders and whatnot, and push it under another slab of rock, maybe 50 miles thick and even less forgiving than your slab of rock.
No prizes for guessing: this does not go well. In other subduction zones, the average time between quakes is 100-200 years. Here, we let the pressure build up a little bit. Eventually, though, the North American plate overcomes the friction, snapping up along the edge (out in the ocean) and collapsing all through the center. According to the offshore cores, the small ("small") earthquakes happen every 300 years or so: these are in the 8.0-8.4 range. The BIG earthquakes have an average return interval of around 500 years: these can go up to 9.2. The San Andreas is expected to max out around 8.0.
Uhh...
But wait. There's more. Those ghost trees....scientists cored them, too. They think the trees were killed when the land under them suddenly dropped several feet and they were flooded with salt water. It was sometime around the year 1700, probably in the winter. You can learn a lot from coring, apparently.
Now, the punchline. In 1996, a Japanese researcher published a paper about Japan's 'orphan tsunami,' an old report about one weird, 16-foot tall wave that came out of absolutely nowhere, with no warning and no associated earthquake. It arrived in the middle of the night on January 26, 1700, about 10 hours after a massive earthquake rocked the Pacific Northwest.
So. Oregon. NOT non-seismic. More about being "overdue" in the 'why now?' post.
Friday, May 19, 2017
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
Why are you doing this?
I left the last post in mysterious place: Bixby! What the hell are you doing? Japan? And earthquakes?
Before I get into that, because circumnavigating the landscaping is fun, I want to you all to know who you all, my multiple audiences, are. Obviously, I'm talking to several crowds in Portland, including my NET (Neighborhood Emergency Team) peeps, my City Club peeps, my work peeps, my PSU classmates, my Quaker crowd (no seismic connection, there...), and many other dear friends in town.
But, many of them already have already been, uh, INTRODUCED to this topic through my ramblings. So these first few blogs will be review for them. I'm mostly talking to friends and family east of here. This matters to you all, too. AND, I think it will help my blogging in Japan to have established the broader context here. If you'd like the executive summary ("summary"), I've got a shorter version on the GoFundMe page: https://www.gofundme.com/Community-Resilience-In-Japan
Circling back to the beginning: why am I doing this thing? About 4 years ago, I completed my NET training. NET (called Community Emergency Response Teams or 'CERT' everywhere else in the world) was created to help decentralize emergency response to problems or disasters. It's a basic instruction that helps citizens help each other, especially if professional aid is expected to be slow in coming. CERTs have cropped up all over the country, particularly in the wake of big storms (Katrina, Sandy), but also in response to more local incidents: tornadoes, train derailments, wildfires. In many places, I get the sense that it's primarily a way to plan ahead.
I love that, of course. But in Portland, NET has also become something of a vehicle for community resilience. After a large earthquake, no amount of pre-staged powdered water is going to suffice. We will rely on each other, and to do that, we need better-stitched social fabric. We need better connected, more humane, less dependent communities. We actually need this everywhere, in my opinion, not just in Portland. But this is where I live, and NET sets it up nicely.
So, that's a start to an answer. My time at NET has led me to explore public health and sanitation, especially within the sewer bureau I work for. It's led me to the City Club of Portland, whose thoughtful policy analysis and passionate wonk-cred ('like recognizes like') are unmatched in Portland. And it's led me to explore even further afield, to Japan.
But, next: what earthquakes?
Before I get into that, because circumnavigating the landscaping is fun, I want to you all to know who you all, my multiple audiences, are. Obviously, I'm talking to several crowds in Portland, including my NET (Neighborhood Emergency Team) peeps, my City Club peeps, my work peeps, my PSU classmates, my Quaker crowd (no seismic connection, there...), and many other dear friends in town.
But, many of them already have already been, uh, INTRODUCED to this topic through my ramblings. So these first few blogs will be review for them. I'm mostly talking to friends and family east of here. This matters to you all, too. AND, I think it will help my blogging in Japan to have established the broader context here. If you'd like the executive summary ("summary"), I've got a shorter version on the GoFundMe page: https://www.gofundme.com/Community-Resilience-In-Japan
Circling back to the beginning: why am I doing this thing? About 4 years ago, I completed my NET training. NET (called Community Emergency Response Teams or 'CERT' everywhere else in the world) was created to help decentralize emergency response to problems or disasters. It's a basic instruction that helps citizens help each other, especially if professional aid is expected to be slow in coming. CERTs have cropped up all over the country, particularly in the wake of big storms (Katrina, Sandy), but also in response to more local incidents: tornadoes, train derailments, wildfires. In many places, I get the sense that it's primarily a way to plan ahead.
I love that, of course. But in Portland, NET has also become something of a vehicle for community resilience. After a large earthquake, no amount of pre-staged powdered water is going to suffice. We will rely on each other, and to do that, we need better-stitched social fabric. We need better connected, more humane, less dependent communities. We actually need this everywhere, in my opinion, not just in Portland. But this is where I live, and NET sets it up nicely.
So, that's a start to an answer. My time at NET has led me to explore public health and sanitation, especially within the sewer bureau I work for. It's led me to the City Club of Portland, whose thoughtful policy analysis and passionate wonk-cred ('like recognizes like') are unmatched in Portland. And it's led me to explore even further afield, to Japan.
But, next: what earthquakes?
Sunday, May 7, 2017
Reboot
So. Take 3 on 'Travel Blogging'.....
It's a bit odd, looking at my last post, from a road trip to Albuquerque that apparently ended in the middle somewhere. By way of excusing myself, I did comment on how annoying it is to blog via smart phone. And, at the other end of the guilt spectrum, I have already received a bit of smackdown, a dollop of snark, from a co-worker about my failure as a blogger. My journal-writing is spectacularly inconsistent, so why should my blog be any different?
Annnd, we're moving on. And at a pretty high rate of speed, too. Not just because I want to get away from this ridiculous segue, but because I'm moving quickly, giddily almost, towards the Next Big Adventure. You can almost hear my voice getting more bass from the Doppler shift. This text color should be increasingly....red?
It's Japan. On June 15th, I'm catching a non-stop (!!) from Portland to Tokyo, to take a one-week course in the Sendai/Fukushima area, sponsored by Portland State (PSU). The Japanese, it seems, are intent on communicating their experiences with large earthquakes and tsunamis to the folks who need to hear it: Portlanders.
For many of you outside the Pacific Northwest, what I've just typed makes no sense whatsoever. What earthquake? Why me? Why now? What could Portland possibly have to do with Japanese earthquakes? Over the next few posts, I'll try to explain this piece.
But, before I do: there's more. Once that week is up, I'll be wandering Japan for another two weeks. As I dig into the planning for that part of the trip....well, it's a massive rabbit-hole. I just spent an hour comparing railpasses. It's hard to convey how completely stoked this train nut/former travel agent is right now. Railpasses....for bullet trains. DUDE. If only the maglev train would hurry up and get built! If I do nothing but ride the train back and forth for two weeks, no one should be surprised.
Naturally, there's a lot of posting to be done and almost no time to do it. I'm in the middle of my spring field season, treating weeds, and the weather has been....difficult. I find myself once again scrambling and juggling the schedule, but this time with a hard deadline. Come June 15th, whether the work is done or not, I'm out. It's both freeing and worrisome.
I'm going to let this sit for the moment, as my (re)introduction. In the next post, I'll explain what earthquakes have to do with me in Portland, which will, in turn, explain the class.
It's a bit odd, looking at my last post, from a road trip to Albuquerque that apparently ended in the middle somewhere. By way of excusing myself, I did comment on how annoying it is to blog via smart phone. And, at the other end of the guilt spectrum, I have already received a bit of smackdown, a dollop of snark, from a co-worker about my failure as a blogger. My journal-writing is spectacularly inconsistent, so why should my blog be any different?
Annnd, we're moving on. And at a pretty high rate of speed, too. Not just because I want to get away from this ridiculous segue, but because I'm moving quickly, giddily almost, towards the Next Big Adventure. You can almost hear my voice getting more bass from the Doppler shift. This text color should be increasingly....red?
It's Japan. On June 15th, I'm catching a non-stop (!!) from Portland to Tokyo, to take a one-week course in the Sendai/Fukushima area, sponsored by Portland State (PSU). The Japanese, it seems, are intent on communicating their experiences with large earthquakes and tsunamis to the folks who need to hear it: Portlanders.
For many of you outside the Pacific Northwest, what I've just typed makes no sense whatsoever. What earthquake? Why me? Why now? What could Portland possibly have to do with Japanese earthquakes? Over the next few posts, I'll try to explain this piece.
But, before I do: there's more. Once that week is up, I'll be wandering Japan for another two weeks. As I dig into the planning for that part of the trip....well, it's a massive rabbit-hole. I just spent an hour comparing railpasses. It's hard to convey how completely stoked this train nut/former travel agent is right now. Railpasses....for bullet trains. DUDE. If only the maglev train would hurry up and get built! If I do nothing but ride the train back and forth for two weeks, no one should be surprised.
Naturally, there's a lot of posting to be done and almost no time to do it. I'm in the middle of my spring field season, treating weeds, and the weather has been....difficult. I find myself once again scrambling and juggling the schedule, but this time with a hard deadline. Come June 15th, whether the work is done or not, I'm out. It's both freeing and worrisome.
I'm going to let this sit for the moment, as my (re)introduction. In the next post, I'll explain what earthquakes have to do with me in Portland, which will, in turn, explain the class.
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