The 1974 movie with our fellow Wildcat as scary enough at the time. Not sure I want to see the end of California in all its CGI glory...
...beside this already gives me nightmares....
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one?mbid=social_facebook
Thanks for providing that link to the New Yorker Magazine regarding the mysterious "Ghost Forest" on the West Coast of the U.S. - evidencing a major ("The Big One") earthquake that correlates to a major Tsunami that struck Japan centuries ago. Likewise, a submerged forest here in Alaska has been determined to correlate to a "Big One" that occurred 700 to 900 years ago. Here is the scientific reporting accompanied by my photo:
This is a current day view in a photo I took looking down on Girdwood and Cook Inlet from the slopes of Alyeska Ski Resort. Interestingly, a study was done in the early 1990s in which a submerged forest was identified in this area (Girdwood) evidencing that this area of Alaska subsided in another major earthquake approximately 700 years ago. Basically the pressures associated with one tectonic plate submarining under another take about 500-800 years to build up to the point where they "snap" and result in a magnitude 9.0 or greater earthquake with this being an historical pattern that core samples evidence having repeating itself for at least the past 3,000 years. Just after the 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake the conventional wisdom was that we could expect another of similar magnitude in 50 years. The more recent science, as referenced above, suggests it is more likely that it will be another 500 years. Below is an excerpt from the study that found the submerged Girdwood forest.
The valley where the Alyeska resort is today is Girdwood. The railroad tracks in that area were twisted and torn in the March 27, 1964 Earthquake. There was also significant subsidence of the land mass not only in Girdwood, but also a few miles further down the Seward Highway at Portage. Even today you can see remnants of buildings in Portage that are partially sunk into the ground from where the land mass lowered and the tides now come in to partially cover them.
Interestingly though with regard to Girdwood, a study was done in 1992 concluding that a buried forest there is evidence of even greater subsidence that occurred from a previous earthquake hundreds of years ago. Here is an excerpt from the study titled, "The Penultimate Great Earthquake in Southcoastal Alaska: Evidence from buried forest near Girdwood" by Rodney Combellick of the Alaska Division of Geological and Geophysical Survey:
Given the limitations of instrument and
historic records to resolve the recurrence times
of great earthquakes, only geologic investiga-
tion can disclose the long-term record of sud-
den tectonic changes and earthquake effects.
Recent geologic studies indicate that recurrence
intervals for great earthquakes in this region
range from about 400 to 1,300 yr (Plafker and
others, in press). My purpose in this paper is
to present evidence from a coastal marsh near
Girdwood that the penultimate, or second to
last, great earthquake in the Anchorage region
occurred between about 700 and 900 yr ago.
For reference, here are some excerpts from your linked article regarding the "Big One" that struck our West Coast in 1700 and projections as to what the geological record tells us about when to expect the next "Big One" on the West Coast:
"Finally, in a 1996 article in
Nature, a seismologist named Kenji Satake and three colleagues, drawing on the work of Atwater and Yamaguchi, matched that orphan to its parent—and thereby filled in the blanks in the Cascadia story with uncanny specificity. At approximately nine o’ clock at night on January 26, 1700, a magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck the Pacific Northwest, causing sudden land subsidence, drowning coastal forests, and, out in the ocean, lifting up a wave half the length of a continent. It took roughly fifteen minutes for the Eastern half of that wave to strike the Northwest coast. It took ten hours for the other half to cross the ocean. It reached Japan on January 27, 1700: by the local calendar, the eighth day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year of Genroku."
.....
"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."
.....
"Each sample contains the history, written in seafloorese, of the past ten thousand years. During subduction-zone earthquakes, torrents of land rush off the continental slope, leaving a permanent deposit on the bottom of the ocean. By counting the number and the size of deposits in each sample, then comparing their extent and consistency along the length of the Cascadia subduction zone, Goldfinger and his colleagues were able to determine how much of the zone has ruptured, how often, and how drastically.
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."
For what it is worth, if anyone is interested in my own experience with regard to the 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake, here is a link to a thread with commentary and additional photos that I took at the time. The thread extends at least two pages and the photos and commentary are on both of the first two pages of the thread:
https://forums.collectors.com/messa...76&highlight_key=y&keyword1=alaska+earthquake
