Quake Up-Date

It could be worse. Indeed, we're fucking begging to be put out of your misery:

The scenario developed in recent years for planning purposes assumes a magnitude as large as 7.8. But what if it might be even bigger? Maybe ten times bigger than previously thought possible?

"I think we do need to rethink how large an event it could be," said Victor Tsai, PhD, a geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology.

Tsai is a member of the research team that came to that eye-opening conclusion after studying a recent large quake that occurred half a world away, off the western coast of Sumatra.

The April 11 quake was larger than previously thought possible – magnitude 8.6 from a type of fault system that's not supposed to produce quakes that large.

Significantly for Southern California, it is the same type of fault mechanism as the San Andreas.

[...]

"We might have to change our modeling of the San Andreas," Tsai said.

Modeling the impact of a 7.8 magnitude quake on the lower San Andreas yielded projections of thousands of casualties and billions of dollars in damage from desert communities to the Los Angeles basin.

It would take weeks or months to restore utilities and transportation corridors. Most tall buildings would survive, but a handful of downtown's skyscrapers would be expected to collapse.

We don't want those hippies in the Northwest w/ their fancy-ass Cascadia subduction zone to top us do we? We didn't think so. And isn't Yellowstone overdue for an extinction level event?

So many reasons to keep living a few more yrs. When's that asteroid due for the "near miss?"