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So it looks like beastquakes don't just occur in Seattle!

In other news, the sky is BLUE! OMG, it's BLUE!!!!!!!!

Why the heck we have to have this sort of crap in the news after every tiny little tremor is beyond me. Yeah, the Pacific Northwest (where I live) is one of several areas in the world where major earthquakes happen every so often, geologically speaking. There's also a nice juicy volcano just waiting to blow its top. ZOMG, what next? Tornados? Oh wait ... that happens every so often also.

Someone wake me when we have a real disaster.

Safety tip #1: if you ever move here, don't hang anything over the head of your bed.

>Unfortunately, those who predict an earthquake don't give much guidance for preparation. It would be useful to know, for example, what an earthquake is likely to do to a wooden house held together by nails.

Actually, you have to actively hide from that sort of information if you don't want it. There is a tremendous amount of information and assistance on structural and non-structural pre-quake mitigation. Google is your friend.

Incidently, it is probably more important to consider what sort of soil/landform your house is built on. If you're on some sort of alluvium, you're probably screwed.

>The subduction zone is off the coast. How would an earthquake there affect Portland, Oregon, which is 80 miles inland? What bridges would be destroyed in Portland? What buildings?

Portland is actually about 55 miles inland from Cape Meares. All of your questions can be answered . If you live in earthquake country, you have to be actively hiding under a rock to avoid this information. That's not to say people don't, of course.

Although I think traditional science is a better method of investigating these sorts of incidents I think the idea of tracing back through myths and stories to reach an actual point in time where some group of people actually experienced the event is fascinating. Whether it's just wishful thinking or not and can ever be tied down this precisely is I think questionable.

This article gives an idea of how difficult it is to tie down anything specific from myth and oral history, at least in part due to the very imperfect record we have. European exploerers were not generally very interested in preserving native cultural traditions, and migration, progression and conquest within native cultures before Eurpean contact wiped out information even more thoroughly.

One interesting note in the paper is the remark that it is easy to distinguish between myth and history within the oral accounts based on style alone. Early flood myths are likely to be heavily processed specifically to remove regional detail, to make them more universal. The most obvious case of this is the Biblical flood myth, which to anyone with an unbiased prior appears to be little more than a monotheistic gloss on the Sumerian myth of much earlier date.

On the other hand, it is likely that the Harappan civilization was trading with the Sumerians at the time of this impact, or shortly after it. It would be amusing if the Sumerian flood story, frequently assumed to be the source of the Biblical flood story, in its own turn was found to be derivative of a quite different story from far away.

Cardiologists must hate working here in the pacific northwest. This quake summary from the Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network demonstrates what I'm sure is a corelary for coronaries:

http://www.pnsn.org/recenteqs/latest.htm

Toss in Mount Baker, Mout Rainier, Mount Adams, Mount Hood, and Mount Jefferson (all volcanoes in the NW), and I'm beginning to suspect we here could be accused of the same idiocy with which some people in the hurricane "belt" are blamed, but on a slightly more geologic scale.

The Cascadia subduction zone, off of the Pacific Northwest region of the US, has a potential very similar to the one that just quaked in Sumatra. In recent history it seems to have quaked about every 400-600 years, with the last one being about 305 years ago. You can read about it here.

They also have a seismogram on the southern side of Mt. Saint Helens that directly posts information onto the internet. While many might not understand the significance of reading it, you can still actually see there is quite a bit of activity.

Seismogram is viewable here.

Interestingly enough, they actually had a seismogram that was on top of the lava dome, but it was destroyed in the first steam explosion at the beginning of the month.

Also the Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network, a parent network to the St Helens area has the daily shots as a loop, with more info here. The earthquake maps plotted out over time are also very interesting.

Also the Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network, a parent network to the St Helens area has the daily shots as a loop, with more info here. The earthquake maps plotted out over time are also very interesting.

it has increased to beyond 3.0 quakes now. Check out: http://www.pnsn.org/HELENS/mshrec_eqs.html and get the most up-to-date list.

It was a joke.

Sorry that was lost on you.

http://www.spinaltapfan.com/

Thanks for the link on Richter scales. I am already quite familiar with the terminology, however, as I sit less than 50 ft away from a portion of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.

We reported a nice small tremor yesterday.

The Webicorder is a Web display of seismic data. The display looks like paper records made by machines called "helicorders". A plot of the data is called a seismogram.

http://www.pnsn.org/WEBICORDER/K20/about.html