Russia endured a massive earthquake last night, sending tsunami waves around the Pacific. Eight point eight is a massive quake, which has sent serious but not dramatic or especially deadly tsunami waves to Japan and Hawaii. One of its aftershocks reached 6.9 on the Richter scale. Coastal authorities as far away as New Zealand and San Francisco were warning about the onset of strange and adverse conditions on their coastlines. Russia’s Klyuchevskoy volcano is erupting in the seismic activity.

No sign of The Gatekeeper known as Zuul or other portentous celestial creatures have been found at the site. (I kid.)

Anyway, every major earthquake reminds me that seismologists fear the “really big one” is overdue to hit our Pacific Northwest. The New Yorker did a great piece on it in 2015:

When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west — losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. (Watch what your fingertips do when you flatten your hand.) The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs fema’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.

You should read the whole ting.