Massive earthquakes? Feh.
Some 760,000 years ago, before our species took its first steps on Earth, an enormous eruption in what is now eastern California sent high-speed rivers of ash and lava across an area tens of miles across. The event ejected ash as far east as present-day Nebraska.
When the dust settled, six days later, the Long Valley supervolcano had disgorged about 1,400 times the volume of lava, gas and ash as the famous 1980 supereruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington.
And since 1978, Long Valley has shown signs of restlessness, with the depressed valley at the center of the volcano (the caldera) showing uplift, possibly from magma moving toward the surface.
8 comments:
Yep. You could get wiped out by the Long Valley super volcano. Or by the one underneath Yellowstone, or by the Big One in Southern California or San Francisco, or by the slippage on the Cascadia subduction zone. More likely, we need to get our lives in order before we meet our Maker in a less catastrophic event. Or, the Lord may return. We do not know the day or the hour. :-)
Me, I hope the Yellowstone goes first. I hate it when Callee just has to be first in everything. ;-)
I have relatives who would be wiped out by either, so I don't have a preference.
If Yellowstone goes, Missouri goes with it pretty much next day. And I have to think it would be faster than if Callee goes first.
A friend, considering moving west, recently opined that if the Yellowstone caldera blew up, it would be better to be nearby and go immediately than to be on the fringes and suffer for a while. Cheerful fellow.
The others, it seems to me, would be devastating mostly west of the Sierras.
When we lived for a while upriver from you in southeast Iowa, we considered whether we should get earthquake insurance against the New Madrid fault. We were just far enough away to decide it wasn't worth it.
New Madrid's the other thing I have to worry about. Not much of any building around St. Louis is built to withstand a serious earthquake. When New Madrid goes, that's going to be pretty much it for this area and for me.
If you're living on filled-in land, you've got a problem. I suppose much of the St. Louis area is river sediment. They definitely should have started looking at earthquake building codes long ago. It's Memphis that will probably collapse entirely.
It would simply ruin my backpacking and photography in the Sierra Nevada. I know it seems kind of selfish.
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