Seattle Earthquake Risk

Seattle’s tallest buildings are at risk of collapse during a rupture of the Cascadia fault zone in the Pacific Northwest, say U.S. seismic experts. The Cascadia subduction zone is likely to produce the strongest shaking experienced from earthquakes in the lower 48 states, said seismic experts from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

While the Pacific Northwest has experienced little seismic activity in 200 years, there is growing consensus the Cascadia subduction zone ruptures in giant earthquakes exceeding 9 on the Richter scale, Caltech scientists Thomas Heaton and Jin Yang said Thursday at the Seismological Society of America’s annual meeting in Monterey, Calif. The Cascadia subduction zone last ruptured in 1700, Heaton and Yang said.

Simulations at Caltech show such earthquakes, which last for more than 4 minutes and are dominated by low-frequency motions, would be exacerbated by the geography of the Seattle basin and cause severe damage among modern high-rises, said Heaton and Yang.

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Newsweek: The End of Christian America

It was a small detail, a point of comparison buried in the fifth paragraph on the 17th page of a 24-page summary of the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey. But as R. Albert Mohler Jr.—president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the largest on earth—read over the document after its release in March, he was struck by a single sentence. For a believer like Mohler—a starched, unflinchingly conservative Christian, steeped in the theology of his particular province of the faith, devoted to producing ministers who will preach the inerrancy of the Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the only means to eternal life—the central news of the survey was troubling enough: the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent. Then came the point he could not get out of his mind: while the unaffiliated have historically been concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, the report said, “this pattern has now changed, and the Northeast emerged in 2008 as the new stronghold of the religiously unidentified.” As Mohler saw it, the historic foundation of America’s religious culture was cracking.

“That really hit me hard,” he told me last week. “The Northwest was never as religious, never as congregationalized, as the Northeast, which was the foundation, the home base, of American religion. To lose New England struck me as momentous.” Turning the report over in his mind, Mohler posted a despairing online column on the eve of Holy Week lamenting the decline—and, by implication, the imminent fall—of an America shaped and suffused by Christianity. “A remarkable culture-shift has taken place around us,” Mohler wrote. “The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture.” When Mohler and I spoke in the days after he wrote this, he had grown even gloomier. “Clearly, there is a new narrative, a post-Christian narrative, that is animating large portions of this society,” he said from his office on campus in Louisville, Ky.

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More Americans Say They Have No Religion

A wide-ranging study on American religious life found that the Roman Catholic population has been shifting out of the Northeast to the Southwest, the percentage of Christians in the nation has declined and more people say they have no religion at all.

Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey.

Northern New England surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the least religious region, with Vermont reporting the highest share of those claiming no religion, at 34 percent. Still, the study found that the numbers of Americans with no religion rose in every state.

“No other religious bloc has kept such a pace in every state,” the study’s authors said.

In the Northeast, self-identified Catholics made up 36 percent of adults last year, down from 43 percent in 1990. At the same time, however, Catholics grew to about one-third of the adult population in California and Texas, and one-quarter of Floridians, largely due to Latino immigration, according to the research.

Nationally, Catholics remain the largest religious group, with 57 million people saying they belong to the church. The tradition gained 11 million followers since 1990, but its share of the population fell by about a percentage point to 25 percent.

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Prediction of 9.0 NW Earthquake Now Echoed by U.S. Scientists

Recent findings by scientific experts echo a prediction, from 2005, of a mammoth earthquake that will be centered in the Pacific Northwest. The prediction by Billy Meier, a 71-year old Swiss man with a remarkable, 58-year record of specific, accurate predictions, and the report from 2008 by Oregon State University scientists (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080826124413.htm) agree on the likelihood of an enormous natural disaster occurring. However, Meier’s warning also specifically mentioned a gigantic tsunami that would produce unimaginably devastating consequences for residents of the Pacific coast.

On June 25, 2005, over three years before the OSU report was issued, Meier published the following warning, “According to our preview there will be a seaquake of 9 points on the Richter Scale in the region of the North Pacific not far from the American coast, from Portland to the south of California up to Washington in the north. As a result there will be a gigantic fault of several hundred kilometers, when as never before, a seaquake-tsunami will spread in a ring form and produce immense devastation on the main land and on the islands, which will cost many human lives. The seaquake will last for about five minutes, to be followed by additional and less forceful quakes, which will trigger another but less severe tsunami. Some facts about this threatening danger are known to terrestrial scientists, but they are not capable of realizing the really/factually developing catastrophe.”

OSU scientists don’t foresee a tsunami and have a lower estimate of the magnitude of the quake than Meier. Neither they, nor Meier gave a specific date for the predicted events. Even with advance warning and monitoring of natural disasters like hurricanes and tornadoes, the resulting damage and loss of life can be massive. But since the exact time, location and magnitude of earthquakes and tsunamis is rarely, if ever, precisely predicted, the resulting losses in life and property are often far more catastrophic.

It is incumbent upon all pertinent government agencies and officials in the designated areas to immediately create evacuation plans and to warn the population in the areas most at risk of the possibility of a tsunami, so that they can make their own escape plans for their families and themselves.

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