Condolences to Indonesia & Samoa

Global cooling and desertification. Samoa is desertificated and the drought had reached life threatening proportions with water not being able to be shipped in fast enough. Cleared land also allows tsunamis to become more deadly - as we saw in Indonesia in 2004. The cattle were dying on the roadside there until this event. God knows what's going on now.

The Philippines always receive their share of storms, but the wet that comes with cooling is making it a furious season there. The last time their storms were this severe was about 40 years ago during the colder 70's.

Indonesia is sitting on multiple subduction zones and in parts of that country there has never been a lack of 7 and 8 mag quakes, volcanoes, and mudslides. About 2 years ago that place shook so hard so often it's incredible they still have a country to shake. They had around 300 quakes - and I'm not talking 2 mag quakes - I'm talking 4 and over - in the matter of about 6 weeks. Those plate convergences there make parts of that territory just dangerous places to live. Unfortunately - it is usually the poor that end up in the most deadly of the regions as it is all they can afford. Also unfortunately - those plates are just going to keep shifting. The landslide areas are getting worse, too, as they have become desertificated as well. A flood there right now would be unbelievably devastating.

Not sure where you are in CA but in a few spots you are very correct in the statement "There but by the Grace of God go I".

I knew you would respond to this - I should have "Hey Sal..." in the topic. Thanks for your good information...

Yes it has not escaped me that we are close to the "Pacific Rim" - the same ocean where these countries are close to...

I am correct in my statement no matter where I am. You never know what will hit you or where it is coming from. You never know if you will survive it or if you would be better off dead afterward. Good thing this is not all there is or I would worry.

If we are walking around in one piece, it is a blessing and we shouldn't take it for granted.

However, like where are you referring to? lol - just out of curiosity. When we had our last bad quake in the San Francisco Bay Area (the only serious one in my lifetime), it was an under water deal and that is why some of the bridges were damaged.

I am in a precarious place for earthquake faults - more so now that I have left San Francisco - there they only worry about the San Andreas Fault. Here I have the Hayward Fault, the San Andreas and the Rogers Creek Fault. The latter two haven't 'gone off' in centuries and are due any day now to hear people who worry about it talk.

I am right at sea level on the far east end of San Francisco bay (30 miles from SF) so if there is a Tsunami, fergeddaboutit I am done.

Truer words never spoken Pat. Mom Nature isn't graced with predictability.

You're right on the tip of the San Andres, which I KNOW I just spelled wrong and not gonna look it up right now. It runs North and connects with the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Not sure how it hooks up or if the right shake up there would set off that fault, too. The really dangerous one out there is the Cascadia - it could blow off at 9 Mags any time now. They thought it was gonna go last year but it calmed down (whew). It blew off a 9 mags in about 1710 and inundated Japan in the resulting tsunami. West coast line sucked in some pretty impressive waves too. So you probably would get that - not sure how much time you'd have to get inland but probably would have some warning and at least a little time. If it blew like in the 1700s you'd want to head inland toward Blackhawk. I think you'd be safe on the top there by the windmills. That one might slide in heavy rain, it's pretty well deforested, but for a tsunami it should do the trick in the SF area. I'd hate to see those windmills slide.

As far as danger Pat - there are just some areas that should have never been populated and VERY well should not have been deforested. Ya know Indonesia coast and other coastlines there have had tsunamis that made almost no impact on the land when the coasts were forested - clear em for urban sprawl and not only are masses of people parking on a dangerous area, the very act of clearing it out to park there makes it just that much more deadly. A lot of deaths you are going to hear about in the coming months are directly related to deforestation and desertification. That land won't absorb and hold water. Forestry does a lot to hold torrents down to a miserable yet containable mess.

And of course once you get major populations in areas that are dangerous, there are gonna be massive casualties in an emergency. Check out Mt Vesuvius there in Greece. something like 800,000 people living right at the bottom of the mountain and they are expecting it to blow. The gov is actually trying to get people to move just in case - they were anyway. Not sure how that effort is going.
Then there's Seattle - sitting on sediment with a major faultline that connects right to the subduction zone running right down the middle of it. Ya think that might cause a tad of a problem if those plates slip? How many millions live there?

Then there is one of the most dangerous places on earth - the Kermadec Islands. They are a subduction zone and shake..hard and frequently- they belch fire and rock and sulfur and get hit with tsunamis........but nobody really lives there so you never hear about all the havoc in that region. Nobody noticed until global tracking.

Guess ya just have to be aware of what your choices are and hope that you don't get accidentally bitch slapped by something totally bazarre. LOL.

Yes, Sal the Cascadia does sound ominous alright - I had to go and look it up.

Cascadia subduction zone - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It does touch the San Andreas around the Mendocino coast in California - not a very populated area, at all, but not all that far from here - less than 150 miles.

That just might be the piece of California that breaks off and falls in the sea - would hate to disappoint all the people in the midwest waiting for that to happen! LOL. (they think we have earthquakes every day and that the whole state will eventually break off and float away).

The Cascadia really covers a long way from Canada, to Washington and California.

BTW correction on my above post:

It is Hayward and Rogers Creek that haven't gone off in centuries, not San Andreas. The Hayward is the one people are really afraid of here because Alameda County and the areas surrounding Hayward are heavily populated.

Well anyway - gives another meaning to rock and roll and sleep tight -

eeee!

Pat - When Cascadia slips again it's most likely to do the most damage in the Central WA to BC area. Those slips aren't like dominoes and unless another fault is hooked directly the subduction trench the quake itself isn't going to travel, although that subduction line is 1500 miles long so there will be many effected. I don't think it will set off San Andreas. Might put SF underwater though temporarily. That whole regio is just one big mass of connected crustal blocks - a lot of little fused plates. I would think that if anything gets submerged due to quake it would be that island. I'm not real sure what the structure is underneath -- but as far as California falling into the ocean - you will have the satisfaction of not giving Easterners any joy other than possibly the Islands. There are plates underneath that State - it's not just hanging out over water. That whole thing about falling into the sea just can't happen on the continent. Heck one of the reasons you have Mt's on the W coast is because there are plates pushing and buckling that ground up. It would be interesting to know how that whole "cal will fall in" thing got started.

What might have been in people's heads was that when faultlines slip one side can drop quite a distance - very fast. In 89 when the quake hit over by Chalis ID the one side of the plate dropped about 12 feet - but in Central Oregon one side of that fault dropped about 2,500 feet instantaneously. Can't remember when - I think it was in the thousands of years ago rather than millions though. Well, of course, if the West side of the San Andreas took that kind of plunge it would probably submerge some land but that's a bit different than just having part of the continent fall off. I doubt that you will get that kind of action out of it. That was a whole crustal block that heaved.
The really bad places for that kind of thing are Washington and NE Oregon out to Yellowstone.

We're in the middle of both a magnetic and geographic polar shift right now (shift not flip) and so the amount of the hard core Quakes are up - especially the 6 and 8 mags so it is a good idea for anyone around fault lines and plate convergences might wanna take notes on quake safety.

I do an Earthwatch series on my site RHS1 and we are pretty in depth with Non-politicalized science so you might wanna breeze through the newsletters here and again. I think most of our quake and warming series made it through the virus - at least most of the links work, LOL. We're on to more important issues now though since there is no warming - and scientists are looking at how to cope with a world that just went over carrying capacity and desertification and cooling is already tipping our hand as you can see by all the recent floodings in desertificated areas. It's gonna get rough this time around. Last time we had this kind of cold was the seventies and the population has about doubled since then and we've deforested over 50% of the rain forests, and are desertificating land to the tune of millions of hectacres a year.

If fuel prices rise again we're looking at major devastation to some places - like Haiti. They need fuel to cook their major food grain which is poisonous when not cooked. Last time gas rose so high it put people out stripping the forests for fuel. There's not much left there for them to strip. I'm not real sure that there is enough forestry left to get those people through another winter of soaring gas prices and once it's gone that place is will be nothing but a disaster zone no matter what the weather does. It's been rendered all but uninhabitable already. The only way to save that place is to reforest - and to get it done real fast before that land desertificates.

There's a few spots on this globe that aren't gonna look the same by spring. Trust me on that one.