![]() Question: Did you see inaccuracies in the New Yorker article or was there anything about it that bothered you?Īnswer: Overall, it was a well-written and documented article. And a Yellowstone eruption is so unlikely and so prevalent among questions from the public that it is a major source of irritation to many scientists. Question: Any chance of a NW quake setting off the Yellowstone caldera?Īnswer: Zero. But I haven't heard of any good evidence that Mount Rainier or other Cascade volcanoes erupted in a serious way in 1700, the year of our last megaquake. Several of Japan's volcanoes became more active after their M 9 quake and tsunami in 2011. In other places, like Chile, volcanic eruptions have followed major earthquakes. Question: How would a major earthquake affect the nearby volcanoes?Īnswer: The same process of subduction - where one tectonic plate dives under another - is responsible for both our earthquake risk and the creation of our volcanoes. It needs more testing and full funding before it is ready to be released to the public, however. Question: Will Seattle (or anywhere in the PNW, really) ever implement earthquake early warning systems as mentioned in the New Yorker article about Japan?Īnswer: We are currently testing earthquake early warning in the Pacific Northwest, in fact I have it on my phone now. So in the case of very, very, very rare and large events, one is not limited to just one fault. But remember, breakage of Cascadia has a small chance of triggering the Queen Charlotte fault, which has a small chance of triggering big faults along the Aleutians. I think the global limit is thought to be somewhere around 10. The Gutenberg-Richter distribution is recast as the truncated or doubly-truncated Gutenberg Richter distribution, which reflects approaching a physical limit on the possible size of earthquakes. At the highest magnitude, the magnitude-frequency distribution is no longer exponential. Or is the distribution of big earthquakes something that we don't really have a good handle on at the moment?Īnswer: Good question. Do you know if the distribution is roughly uniform? My guess is that it would tend to decrease over time - but I've also just googled and found articles that suggest continental drift is actually speeding up. ![]() Question: You say the average frequency of such an event is 1 in 300 years.
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