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On a side note: just think of all the jobs it will create as America will have to be rebuilt to be great again.
The sad part is that it's not closer to D.C. !
On a side note: just think of all the jobs it will create as America will have to be rebuilt to be great again.
The sad part is that it's not closer to D.C. !
There will be positions to be filled as a great majority of the workforce will be buried under meters of ash
If it goes in a worst case scenario, you won't have to worry about it for long... of course if it did it would be the ultimate schadenfreude moment as Mexico uses the Trump wall to keep out fleeing Americans.
It is estimated that if Yellowstone goes in full (and it is worth noting that most Yellowstone eruptions are not the mega-eruptions that only occur about every 800,000 years, but comparatively minor burps) then the fact that someone lives in Hawaii or New Zealand is hardly going to leave them unaffected.
The estimated ejecta from a full eruption of the supervolcano is 330 cubic kilometers. Compare this to a mere 1 cubic kilometer for the St. Helens eruption of 1980. Out to a radius of 250 miles, ash-depth would be 3+ feet. Out to 500 miles, ash-depth would be 1+ feet. There's no recovering from that - where that happens, land is rendered wasteland for centuries. Every metropolitan area of any size in Montana would have to be evacuated. Permanently. In Wyoming, the extreme SE of the state - Cheyenne, Laramie - would probably remain habitable. The rest? Permanent evacuation. There would be millions of refugees. At least one year of crops in the central United States and Canada would immediately be lost just to ashfall. North American air travel would immediately cease, probably for weeks if not months - depending on how long the volcano continues to periodically belch. Global air travel would be severely disrupted. The dust cloud would quickly circle the planet, and the resulting cool-down would last for years and would make the Year Without a Summer (1815, due to the Tambora eruption) look like a picnic. The global economy would fail. Famines would ensure and persist due to the sunlight disruption. It is likely that hundreds of millions of people, if not a billion-plus, would die - not killed directly by the eruption but by the serious kick in the head it would deliver to our rather delicate interdependent global civilization.
The reason not to worry isn't the silly "Ha! Ha! I live out west, so I'd just watch it on the tube and everything'd be hunky-dory for me!" but because the odds of it happening in the next century are probably at least 1000-1.
I learn so much on C-D!
Perhaps I should put off the home remodeling projects I had planned for later this year!
Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Olympia... when the Cascadia Subduction Zone lets go, every city west of the Cascades will be leveled by the earthquake, and every coastal city and village swept away by the tsunami that will follow within a half hour. The entire Pacific Northwest will be basically closed for business for months or years. It will be the most devastating natural disaster ever to hit the United States (unless Yellowstone lights off first,) and the national economy will be crippled.
1 in 10 chance of that happening in the next 50 years, if I recall correctly. I probably won't be around to see it, but our grandchildren probably will. It's already 60 or 70 years "overdue," if you go by the average length of time between Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake/tsunamis. Of course, it may not happen for 100 years, but it will definitely happen, and there's no way to avoid it. You do not want to be there when it does.
But that's assuming that it will be a sudden catastrophic event. Subduction goes on at various place around the globe every day, occasionally causing a catastrophic event, but not usually.
I was just reading on a government site about the caldera. It said that since placing the monitors thirty years ago little change in activity has been noted. If so, and compared to earlier activity in my lifetime, there seems to be a significant change.
I had visited there with my parents in the mid sixties and revisited about a decade ago and I remember noting the difference immediately. During my last visit it was like the Fourth of July compared to my first visit! The area around Old Faithful was alive with geysers going off. Even the rare Steamboat one. (Think I named that one right.)
Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Olympia... when the Cascadia Subduction Zone lets go, every city west of the Cascades will be leveled by the earthquake, and every coastal city and village swept away by the tsunami that will follow within a half hour. The entire Pacific Northwest will be basically closed for business for months or years. It will be the most devastating natural disaster ever to hit the United States (unless Yellowstone lights off first,) and the national economy will be crippled.
1 in 10 chance of that happening in the next 50 years, if I recall correctly. I probably won't be around to see it, but our grandchildren probably will. It's already 60 or 70 years "overdue," if you go by the average length of time between Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake/tsunamis. Of course, it may not happen for 100 years, but it will definitely happen, and there's no way to avoid it. You do not want to be there when it does.
Large masonry structures will get messed up, along with bridges, but the vast majority of the houses in the PNW are wood structures that will be just fine. They may lose a few windows, but that is all. There will be no tsunami in the Puget Sound. The Pacific Coast is very steep, so instead of rolling for miles inland, any tsunami will be lucky to make it a few hundred yards. All the flat land was used up a century ago, so recent construction is all on the hills. You an watch the Tsunami from historic neighborhoods in Astoria in perfect safety. Plus, any building constructed in the last 25 years has been built to the new seismic code.
There's no doubt it would be a major quake, but hardly apocalyptic. The Cascades will be over 100 miles from the fracture zone, and distance attenuates damage. Some areas will certainly be badly hurt. Seaside will be mostly under water as the ground drops 6 to 8 feet. Other coastal communities are built on hills and will be mostly dry, though badly shaken.
We can also expect volcanic eruptions in the wake of the quake. The magma pools under volcanoes will be shaken like a bottle of pop, and will vent the gasses and some magma. Japan has had several eruptions in the wake of the 2010 quake.
There was a subduction zone quake in Alaska in 1964. They survived fairly well, considering that there were no building codes at the time and engineers had no idea such a quake was possible.
They made a cheesy one on sifi but I can't remember the name.
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