by Glen Stellmacher
On Feb. 28, 2001, I was in middle school, in the computer lab. I remember it vividly. Partway through class, our room started violently shaking. It felt like our school had been placed on top of a slab of cafeteria Jell-O, and someone was shaking the tray as hard as they could.
Continue reading OPINION | The Next ‘Big One’ Could Mean Big Displacement for Seattle’s Black Populationby Kevin Schofield
If you’ve lived here in the Pacific Northwest for a while, you’ve probably heard of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a massive earthquake fault off the coast of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon where the seismic plate holding up the land is slipping underneath the one at the bottom of the ocean. Pressure builds up for centuries along the area where they overlap and rub against each other, and every 500 years a major “rip” occurs where the mainland plate moves farther west and down, and the ocean plate is pushed up (and potentially east). The resulting earthquake is around magnitude 9.0 — about 100 times stronger than the 2001 Nisqually earthquake, our last big seismic event here in Seattle. In addition to the earth-movement damage that it would cause, the uplifting and dropping of the ocean floor along the fault line is expected to cause a tsunami wave.
Continue reading Weekend Long Reads: A Whole Lot of Sloshing Going On! What a Tsunami Would Do in Puget Sound
