We are bound by certain temporal and geographic coordinates, and it’s very very hard to see beyond them. And then one level deeper than that, it’s not a parable, but an example about a really deep problem in our human existence, this kind of problem of scale. But, from the get go, in my mind, it was also really a parable about climate change. On its own, that’s an incredible story, one of the best I’ve ever happened to chance upon. It’s the overt, obvious story, which is the story of the Cascadia subduction zone. Probably the hardest thing about writing this piece was that from the beginning, this story was two stories for me. Update: Michelle Nijhuis interviewed Schulz about how this piece came about and its impact. 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.” By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. 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. (Watch what your fingertips do when you flatten your hand.) The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse.
Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. 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. I know I already posted this in my quick links early last week, but HOLY GOD is this Kathryn Schulz piece about the already-overdue Pacific Northwest earthquake is terrific and terrifying.įlick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again.
0 kommentar(er)
