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Art Frankel and Craig Weaver of the U.S. Geological Survey gave a presentation to the Seattle City Council on Monday (as noted in this agenda) that has raised some eyebrows – and reaffirms our sensitivity to upcoming seismic disturbances. See their PowerPoint presentation or read on for a few copies of a few of their slides.

In 2014, there will be a regular 6 year update to the National Seismic Hazard Maps. A workshop on the Pacific Northwest Portion of this was held locally on March 21-22, 2012.

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Cascadia Subduction Zone Example: the 1700 earthquake that caused shaking and a tsunami that inundated the Oregon coast and reached as far as Japan.

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Two new articles from the Homeland Security Newswire and the Yakima Herald discuss new fault lines (maybe better described as...

If you’ve not come across them, Paul Nichols has created several time lapse earthquake maps. Working at the University of Canterbury's Digital Media Group, he takes USGS or GeoNet data and plots it using the Google Maps API to create a fascinating animation.

The main message is that “the” quake is actually a “quake swarm” - with a few prominent releases that really stand out amongst a background of thousands of smaller...

  You’ve no doubt heard about volunteers across the globe helping assist with Haitian, Libyan, and other crises by crowd sourcing: geolocating and tagging new reports and data from a wide variety of news sources like phones, web forms, tweets, email and more. By filtering for keywords and locating these reports on a map, a wide variety of emergency managers, researchers, and citizens can rapidly get a better feeling for late breaking information – well before a reporter or others have had time to synthesize the data into a summary or overview.

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“This week's earthquake caused the main island of Japan to shift as much as 13 feet to the east, seismologists say. That may sound like a shocker, but it's just one of the natural changes that come along with an 8.9-magnitude temblor — like the 1.6-microsecond speed-up of Earth's daily rotation and the 4-inch shift in Earth's axis.”

- http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/03/12/6256280-how-the-quake-shifted-japan?chromedomain=cosmiclog>1=43001

[updated] Also Cathy Rogers forwarded this link with additional details on this topic:

- http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110314/ts_yblog_thelookout/japans-earthquake-shifted-balance-of-the-planet

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The Pacific Northwest is exploring solutions that can provide officials an overview of a regional event.

The existing situation is very fragmented:

WA State is currently using ESI’s WebEOC (for which Vashon has an account) & ESiWebFUSION but this has an older architecture & cumbersome user interface and doesn’t readily allow integration with other technologies in use elsewhere.

The state has a wrapper or GIS based viewer for WebEOC, known as the Washington Information Sharing Environment (WISE) that also aggregates additional data (including from the military, as it was developed by the National Guard)

I’m not aware of what FEMA or DHS uses, but I suspect it is something else.

Neighboring states use WebEOC and other custom solutions. (Oregon is adopting – with some trouble- a more regional system: Virtual Emergency Network of Multnomah, for instance.)

King County has an independent...

If you’ve not seen it, there is a good map of local faults, with a brief write-up at www.pnsn.org/INFO_GENERAL/puget_faults.html

Click on the image for a larger view.