Well, it could be sort of reassuring but mostly just realistic, I think. I'm sorry these things make you panic! My message is mostly along the lines of "these things will happen and we can't control the planet or hide from them, but we can be reasonably well prepared and try to make informed choices." Which applies to climate change, too: it's already underway and we are well past the point of no return, so now we need to adapt. Happily, we're a very adaptable species.
Oh geez, yeah, geologists can be really bad about color blindness and color schemes for maps. Sorry, on behalf of my colleagues!
Yes, many factors are involved, and not all of them are well constrained. A major subduction earthquake (I don't know what definition of "major" is being used for this stat, but it's usually something like M7.0 or greater) has a 1 in 300 (0.33%) chance of happening in any given year in Cascadia. That could easily be a much smaller event than the worst-case scenario in the New Yorker article, of course. And that probability will be the same next year as it is this year: it doesn't increase next year just because doesn't happen this year. It stays 0.33%. Which is a small chance! Because years are very small increments, geologically speaking! But that also means it's ~100% likely to happen some time in the next ~300 years.
Thanks for adding this. The CDC recommendations are going to be good general info. Local and state documents will vary a lot from place to place, so it's more local information.
It's easy to forget the distances involved! The subduction zone fault surfaces are either very deep (which is less dangerous for us living on the surface), or shallower but offshore. The volcanoes are more or less surficial (magma chambers usually pool a few to a few tens of km down, and the eruption vents are of course right at the surface) and located inland along the volcanic front. And the melting that produces the magma that rises and makes volcanoes at the surface is occurring very, very deep underground. It takes place in the mantle over the subducting slab, not in the crust. It's happening because of the tectonic setting (dehydration of the subducting plate adds water to the mantle wedge and initiates melting of mantle rocks), and earthquakes are also being caused by the tectonic setting (the upper surface of the subduction slab scraping against the overriding plate), but the earthquakes and volcanoes aren't related otherwise.
Rainier is mostly a hazard if you live along one of the lahar-prone valleys, or within a few km of the summit:
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/volcanoes/mount_rainier...
Otherwise the main regional hazard from Cascade volcanoes is ashfall, which is something to be prepared for but typically not crippling.
Yes! The radio nerds will save us all in the apocalypse.
This is actually why a lot of emergency responder centers use air sirens to notify emergency personnel to report in, at least in communities where they don't have regular tornado siren use/drills (since the use of multiple sirens would be confusing). If cell towers go down and power goes out, they can still use that siren.
Well, for periodic events like earthquakes, short time scales matter a lot! The bigger issue is the one the New Yorker touches on about recurrence intervals being average time intervals, not a ticking clock. Nothing is "overdue" here -- that's not how it works. There is just a certain probability that an earthquake of a specific magnitude will happen in a certain time window on this specific fault. We can't be any more specific than that.
![[Avatar]](/images/avatar26.png){kind=avatar}
Lynne E. 
Production