The Really Big One: The Specter of an Earthquake That Will Destroy the American Northwest

One of my favorite pieces of science journalism is this piece about possible disaster at the Cascadia subduction zone, a relatively unknown fault running from California up to Vancouver. It is an incredibly informative piece on the mismatch between human knowledge and geologic timescales, as well as our unpreparedness in the face of environmental change and natural disasters. 

If the earthquake and following tsunami happen in our lifetimes, as it very well may, it would be the greatest disaster that the US has ever seen. “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…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.”

Not only does Schulz outline the potential impacts of such a disaster with the grace that any post-apocalyptic fiction writer might envy, but she also tells the history of how the subduction zone was discovered and understood in a way that rivals a great mystery novel. Scientists, disaster planners, and managers all make an appearance in this article, coalescing in the great specter of a disaster to rule them all. It is a thrilling and deeply terrifying read about human ingenuity and improvidence.