Slip Sliding Away

The current occupant of the White House says that the fires burning in the West are simply the result of bad environmental laws and water wasted by letting rivers flow into the ocean. (Scientists disagree; they say it’s the changing climate.) But maybe the folks in Malibu want to agree with him. They might want less water in the ocean. Melting icebergs have already covered beaches and sand, and now the water is working on coastal cliffs. The U.S. Geological Survey projects are that by the end of this century, cliffs will have eroded as much as 130 feet inland. Much of the California coastline is already protected by sea walls, which have the unintended consequence of speeding up the loss of sand on the beaches.

Who cares; It’s California, right? But what if we lost Seattle? Over the past few months, part of Washington has moved five millimeters westward, a process that occurs about every fourteen months. It’s the result of thousands of tiny earthquakes from the now infamous Cascadia Subduction Zone. Scientists say that the fault line running from Mendocino California to Vancouver Island produces a 9.0 earthquake on average every 500 years, generating a tsunami that wipes out everything deep into the coastline. The last one was 300 years ago. The town of Seaside, Oregon, with fewer than 7,000 residents, recently approved by an overwhelming margin a $100 million bond to move their high school out of the tsunami danger zone.

Scientists have determined that Puget Sound cities – Tacoma and Seattle being the largest – lay closer to the fault line than previously thought. Say good-bye to Microsoft and Amazon and high-calorie coffee drinks. At least Mariners fans will be relieved of their misery. A tsunami is not just a wall of water. The giant wave will be filled with trees and cars and houses and animals and whatever else is between the earthquake and us.

The New Yorker magazine won a Pulitzer Prize for its 2015 report on the looming catastrophe.

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