I just sat through a big earthquake here- East Med

[Huckleberry Finn]

Ayda , a 3 y.o. little girl, rescued from the wreckage "after 91 hours", safe & sound :)

She smiled, everyone cried ...

[Stevo]

Is that guaranteed to be in the vicinity of the Pacific NW or could it happen anywhere on the larger tectonic plate?

Anywhere with active subduction zones is liable to get the megaquakes around magnitude 9. Chile, Indonesia, Japan, etc. Generally, several hundreds kilometers of subduction zone break at once in these type of quakes. California, Turkey, NZ, and so on have another type of major fault that moves horizontally, such as CA's San Andreas or NZ's Alpine faults. Those temblors are "limited" to around 8 magnitude max, but the epicenters are in the upper part of the crust and can be right under cities such as San Francisco, where subduction zones dive hundreds of KM deep into the earth and those epicenters are usually much deeper.

The maximum credible quake on a fault depends on its length and how much of it moves during an event. Nobody expects the whole San Andreas to break during the next "Big One". Seismologists study the fault to find out when the last quakes occurred and how much of the fault was involved by digging trenches across it where it crosses sediments, usually seasonal ponds along the fault traces, since they have offset peat layers that can be C-14 dated.

[metreo]

Living in the SF Bay Area most people don't have earthquake insurance for their homes (we never did tbh) or even bother to have stockpiled supplies. It's certainly not something people talk about or seem much concerned. There was a largish quake a while a go up in Sonoma and of course there are frequent rumbles you might feel if you were laying down which feel like a large is truck driving by the house.

I guess when I look at the larger San Andreas or the Pacific plate more broadly the densely populated areas are only a small percentage of the potential surface area at risk.

It's interesting to travel up to Point Reyes where you can see the large shifts up close.

[Stevo]

Living in the SF Bay Area most people don't have earthquake insurance for their homes (we never did tbh) or even bother to have stockpiled supplies. It's certainly not something people talk about or seem much concerned. There was a largish quake a while a go up in Sonoma and of course there are frequent rumbles you might feel if you were laying down which feel like a large is truck driving by the house.

I guess when I look at the larger San Andreas or the Pacific plate more broadly the densely populated areas are only a small percentage of the potential surface area at risk.

It's interesting to travel up to Point Reyes where you can see the large shifts up close.

It's the plate boundaries that are active, hence the Pacific's "Ring of Fire". Not much happens in the interior of plates unless a hot spot punches through, of which Hawaii is the classic example, or there are old faults already there, such as in the Mississippi Valley.

In the Bay Area, you can also get big shocks from the very active Hayward fault in the East Bay, which runs right under UC Berkeley's stadium. I've always wanted to visit the fault sections that are creeping up there, such as in Hollister: https://geologycafe.com/fieldtrips/hollister.html

The San Andreas itself creeps in the Parkfield area: https://geotripper.blogspot.com/2017/11 ... lt-15.html