Build Up in Oregon

 Ginger has made a habit of watching the daily earthquake update from the geology savant called TheEarthmaster on Youtube. By savant, I mean that he is one of those guys (and they are almost always men) who obsessively watch some genre of phenomenon online using available tools. Because they have an obsessive interest, they have a library in their head of what is normal and what is abnormal.

TheEarthMaster gives daily updates. We don't see him, only his computer screen as he scrolls the globe showing the various tremors over the last twenty-four hours, giving his opinion on various geologic events.

One of his recent curiosities has been the amazing number of tremors---tens of thousands---along the western side of Oregon, uncannily coinciding with the the length of the state from approximately the Columbia River south the California border, encompassing Portland, the Willamette Valley, Roseburg, and Medford.

None of the quakes has been particularly large. But TheEarthMaster's interest has been piqued because this part of the Cascadia region has been amazing quiet in recent years. Wsahington and British Columbia are notorious active. But Oregon has been a quiet gap between California and the Columbia River.

What does this mean? Being an amateur he can only speculate. Everyone knows by now that the Northwest is coming due for a "Big One" on the order of a magnitude 9. The last one was in the year 1700. Everyone knows that such a quake would be devastating beyond imagination. I dare say every educated person in the Northwest has been informed about this, at least since this famous 2015 article in the New Yorker, that was published when we still lived in Portland. Life goes on.

The recent spate of quakes in Oregon cannot help but remind us of this eventuality. Does it portend such a quake? Probably not. But one's mind leaps to it.

The biggest question is: do these recent quakes put pressure on the off-shore subduction fault (where the Big One would happen), or do they relieve pressure on this fault/ One cannot know the answer.

After watching today's report, Ginger has loaded up several videos on Chromecast about the Cascadia Big One and what it would mean, including one that shows animation of the destruction of the Burnside Bridge in Portland, followed by a discussion of the ongoing retrofitting of houses in Portland. Of course there would also be a tsunami that would wipe out entire towns on the Oregon Coast.

Then we watched another video by a fiction author who wrote a series of books depicting the horrific scenario in the Northwest after such a quake (these are avialable on Kindle BTW). Watching these videos made me pray that we are many decades away from such a event. Whatever I say about Portland and how much I don't care if people there burn there own cities to the ground to propitiate the Gods of Wokeness, I cannot imagine the sorrow at having these same places suffer through the Big One in the near future. I can only pray that by the time it happens, we will be a place as a nation where the damage is greatly mitigated (as it was in Japan in 2011, due to the longtime construction practices). Even a puny quake like the 2001 Nisqually quake had heartbreaking consequences. I remember a wonderful old small town movie theater outside Portland, the centerpiece of the old downtown of a small community, that had to be demolished because of that quake, even though it was a "mere" 6.8, and the theater was over a hundred miles away from the epicenter.

O Lord, give the Oregonians time to retrofit. Spare them your wrath, we beg you.

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(video from TheEarthMaster). We also just watched this excellent video from 2015. From the very end of it, I learned that the zone of tremors in the above paragraph, which sit in the area between the Coastal Range and the Cascades, sits approximately over the underground section of the Juan de Fuca Plate which is undergoing constant slippage (as opposed to the shallower subduction area out to sea which is "locked" under the North American Plate). The CWU lecturer in that video also mentioned this book about the Big One to Come, which I include here as reference for myself.