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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. It is stuck, wedged tight against the surface of the other plate.ĭefinitely do not do this after you do the things in the last few paragraphs:įlick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again. When you try it, your right hand will slide up your left arm, as if you were pushing up your sleeve. That is what the Juan de Fuca plate is doing: slipping steadily beneath North America. Now slide your left hand under your right one. The place where they meet is the Cascadia subduction zone.
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Your left hand represents an oceanic plate called Juan de Fuca, ninety thousand square miles in size. Your right hand represents the North American tectonic plate, which bears on its back, among other things, our entire continent, from One World Trade Center to the Space Needle, in Seattle. Take your hands and hold them palms down, middle fingertips touching. Let The New Yorker save your life! GET THE EVERLOVING FUCK OUT OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST WHILE YOU STILL CAN.Īt this point, some of you are going to say “oh, we know! Everyone in the Pacific Northwest already knows about it!” NO. DID YOU READ THE NEW YORKER THIS MORNING? NO? Keep in mind that The New Yorker actually does fact-checking, unlike, say, Harpers, which ran the 15 page AIDS denialist thing by Celia Farber! The New Yorker wants to save your LIFE.