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For your apocalyptic pleasure, the New Yorker runs as story on "the next big one" Earthquake - the one which will happen in the 700 miles long Cascadia subduction zone:
Every fault line has an upper limit to its potency, determined by its length and width, and by how far it can slip. For the San Andreas, one of the most extensively studied and best understood fault lines in the world, that upper limit is roughly an 8.2—a powerful earthquake, but, because the Richter scale is logarithmic, only six per cent as strong as the 2011 event in Japan.
In fact, the science is robust, and one of the chief scientists behind it is Chris Goldfinger. Thanks to work done by him and his colleagues, we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten. Even those numbers do not fully reflect the danger—or, more to the point, how unprepared the Pacific Northwest is to face it. The truly worrisome figures in this story are these: Thirty years ago, no one knew that the Cascadia subduction zone had ever produced a major earthquake. Forty-five years ago, no one even knew it existed.
...Thanks to that work, we now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two hundred and forty-three, which is Cascadia’s recurrence interval: the average amount of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan is dangerous both because it is too long—long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent’s worst fault line—and because it is not long enough. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle.
In regards with preparedness: the TL/DR version is "pants down and properly bent"
...estimates that seventy-five per cent of all structures in the state are not designed to withstand a major Cascadia quake. FEMA calculates that, across the region, something on the order of a million buildings—more than three thousand of them schools—will collapse or be compromised in the earthquake. So will half of all highway bridges, fifteen of the seventeen bridges spanning Portland’s two rivers, and two-thirds of railways and airports; also, one-third of all fire stations, half of all police stations, and two-thirds of all hospitals.
...Fifteen per cent of Seattle is built on liquefiable land, including seventeen day-care centers and the homes of some thirty-four thousand five hundred people. So is Oregon’s critical energy-infrastructure hub, a six-mile stretch of Portland through which flows ninety per cent of the state’s liquid fuel and which houses everything from electrical substations to natural-gas terminals.
...For the seventy-one thousand people who live in Cascadia’s inundation zone, that will mean evacuating in the narrow window after one disaster ends and before another begins. ... Depending on location, they will have between ten and thirty minutes to get out. That time line does not allow for finding a flashlight, tending to an earthquake injury, hesitating amid the ruins of a home, searching for loved ones, or being a Good Samaritan. “When that tsunami is coming, you run,” Jay Wilson, the chair of the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission (OSSPAC), says. “You protect yourself, you don’t turn around, you don’t go back to save anybody. You run for your life.”
So... if you live in Seattle, better move to Chicago?
Original Submission
(Score: 1) by Bromine001 on Tuesday July 14 2015, @02:04PM
Remember when it was the San Andreas fault that was going to cause California to fall into the ocean?
or when the New Madrid Fault was going to cause Missouri and Illinois to collapse?
Or when the Yellowstone supervolcano was going to cover the entirety of North America in hot lava?
I feel like Geologists have cried wolf once too often for me to pay much attention to hyperbole.
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday July 14 2015, @02:48PM
Yes, well, how else are you going to sell geology and get your funding?
There's either, well, humm… probably, at some point in the next 100 years, likely not in your lifetime, no I can't tell you when (or for Yellowstone: humm… probably, at some point in the next 100,000 years, overwhelming odds not in your lifetime [or your grandchildrens' lifetimes, or theirs, or theirs, etc], probably at a point when geology has advanced and we'll have the modeling to see it coming 100 years off.)
Or there's OMG END OF THE WORLD! Plus, disaster movies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2015, @03:30PM
Well, San Andreas thought about making an earthquake. But his insurance told him that earthquakes are not covered in his third-party liability, so he decided to postpone it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Gravis on Tuesday July 14 2015, @04:14PM
Remember when it was the San Andreas fault that was going to cause California to fall into the ocean?
or when the New Madrid Fault was going to cause Missouri and Illinois to collapse?
Or when the Yellowstone supervolcano was going to cover the entirety of North America in hot lava?
⸮tell me about it! these "scientists" keep telling me the Earth is going to be engulfed by the Sun but it hasn't happened! how can people be so wrong about things!⸮
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday July 14 2015, @04:56PM
California won't fall into the ocean, but a large chunk of it will likely be up against Alaska sometime in the distant future. The Wrangellia block caused Denali to form when it hit Alaska, and it is thought (by some) to have once been about where California and a large chunk of other territory is now. It may have been responsible for some of the structure of the Rockies that currently mystifies geologists.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Tuesday July 14 2015, @05:14PM
They can tell there's a build-up of energy, but there's no way to know when it will be released.
Calling it crying wolf is ignorant. An earthquake is coming and it's going to be massive. I don't think trying to wait until the eve of destruction to warn is a viable strategy. Humans do a poor job with risks of catastrophe in the future. At least this way the building codes have been updated to try and mitigate it. But a 9.0 would leave even recent buildings toppled.
(Score: 1) by Type44Q on Tuesday July 14 2015, @07:31PM
I'd be curious to know what the results would be if you took an IQ test. No,really.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday July 14 2015, @09:19PM
I remember when geologists said the San Andreas would eventually cause a big earthquake, and that the New Madrid fault would eventually cause a quake in Missouri and Illinois, and that sometyime in the next 100,000 years the Yel;lowstone supervolcano would erupt.
I also remember the media deciding that wasn't dramatic enough so they played with words to make it sound like it was going to be 10 times as bad and probably next week or so.
My advice: when the media says stuff like that, look up the actual scientists to find out what they actually said. Read carefully.