New Zealand's Tectonic Dragon Awakens | Hacker News Reader

New Zealand's Tectonic Dragon Awakens

newyorker.com

84 pointsmy_first_acct66 comments

People in the Pacific Northwest might be interested in this previous New Yorker article about the Cascadia subduction zone, and the earthquake that will someday hit: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-...

Yup, when that one goes its going to make quite a mess.

This was a really good, morbid read. Thank you.

Indeed, the order of the story is interesting: Starts with the trees that are all the same age in a given place at an 8-months precision, continues with Indian stories related to an event at 50-year precision, and confirmed by Japanese record tracking at a few minutes precision... And the story continues with the primary earthquake, followed by all secondary events, each increasing in exponential damage. It's a great, relatable report of the state of knowledge.

But I can't represent myself the map or extent of this damage. Do we expect 5m people to die in Seatle and Vancouver, or are we expecting rather 100m people to die from Los Angeles to Alaska, and another 1m in Japan?

The article barely mentions the 2010/2011 Canterbury earthquakes - that did more to awaken people to the potential hazard. Most kiwis know about the Napier earthquake in 1932 but it's a distant memory and until 2010 big earthquakes were always something that occurred in remote places like Dusky Sound or Inangahua.

Yep worked in Christchurch hospital through both, hell of a thing, destroyed the entire city.

No it didn't. It destroyed large sections of the CBD, and the eastern suburbs, and that's it. Don't exaggerate please, my city is very much still here and present.

It's very, _very_ hard for me to hold back an emotional response right now. It destroyed practically everything, I worked in the CBD as I said, at the hospital, I know what buildings were brought down because I watched bodies from those buildings enter my building and many of them not leave, I then didn't flee Christchurch straight away, I stayed a year after the second quake to help where I could while I thought I was still valuable. The tilt slab concrete crap that remained was no part of Christchurch they were warehouses and storage facilities turned industrial or commercial sites. The buildings that were destroyed were Christchurch, did some of them rebuild - sure but not many of them and most never can because they wouldn't be up to code. I'm leaving this hear as to be quite honest I think you're only trying to get an emotional backlash that would make me look irrational.

I grew up in Christchurch and lived there until I was in my late 20s. I moved to London like many Kiwis do, but I was back when the Darfield earthquake hit. I moved to SF just before the February quake and came back to the city to visit a few weeks later, due to a death in the family (unrelated to the quake) and because I couldn't stand watching it all on TV and not being there. I've since returned to Christchurch most years to visit family and friends.

I completely agree with your feelings out the change to the city. Before I left for London Christchurch was coming into its own, arts and music were blooming (I was involved with RDU), downtown was finally being revitalized - there were cool places in the old brick buildings on Poplar Lane, alternatives to the miserable Strip bars where adults could go out and have fun. I really felt the city had bright prospects as an alternative to Auckland that wasn't sleepy and centered around agriculture. New Zealand's second city.

Then the earthquake came and ruined everything. Visiting the wreckage of the central city depressed me every time. Also, whenever I visit the interesting things that remain (there's no replacing the Dux in the old Arts Centre) are scattered now all over the city and require a lot of driving or an expensive taxi to get to.

I just can't see myself moving back, at least not for 10-20 years, when we see how this rebuild plays out. It's Auckland or another country, now.

I dug people out of the rubble too, and I never left. You're defining a city by buildings. I define it by its people. Christchurch is a community and we're still here.

I left Christchurch 10 years ago for the US but still get back most years. The first few trips back after the earthquake(s) were very unsettling - destroyed doesn't fully describe just how different the city is now. It's great to finally see a new city emerging now.

I visit every 6-12 months, and to be honest, with all the heritage buildings gone, it's just another boring, white lower class city. Yes the port hills are still there and still amazing but it's not anything close to what it was.

Drone video of the rupture from the Quake https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITbplXBtM8M

The article only touches on the more troubling of NZ fault lines - if the Alpine Fault ruptures, or "unzips" as it is commonly referred to, then really bad things will happen. M8+ earthquakes and major changes to the rest of the South Island.

And this is somewhat likely in the next 50 years.

https://www.gns.cri.nz/Home/Learning/Science-Topics/Earthqua...

Here are a couple of maps showing 10 years of New Zealand earthquakes. The map of deep earthquakes gives a remarkably clear view of the Hikurangi subduction zone (color = depth) https://www.gns.cri.nz/Home/Learning/Science-Topics/Earthqua...

As a resident of Australia I have always liked that I live in the middle of a contential plate that has not been under a mile of ice in the recent past. Sure we lack majestic mountains, but geological stability is a nice alternative.

The problem is complacently means that when small events happen you're going to suffer comparatively more.

I used to work for a structural engineering firm here in New Zealand, and we had to bring in a whole lot of Australian Engineers to meet the workload of assessing buildings in Christchurch after the Earthquake. They said that engineering in Australia is dull and easy compared to in NZ, which is fine until something happens.

Back in 89 there was a comparatively minor Earthquake in Newcastle which resulted in a disproportionate amount of damage and unfortunate loss of life.

I'd kind of rather be sitting in a base isolated modern NZ building in a large earthquake than a non earthquake sound building in another country in a minor earthquake. Of course if I never have to live through another earthquake I'd be most happy.

Be safe. :)

Its all about spending your energy preparing for more likely damaging events. In Australia little attention gets paid to earthquakes but fire safety standards and preparation are no joke, especially in the country.

Maintaining fire breaks and doing controlled burns are a big part of life for a lot of country people. Its not entirely uncommon for people to have backup generators and a pump specifically so they can still pump water in the event of a fire and power has been lost. Many homes that are surrounded by bush sit on their own little island of barren ground that has been cleared of virtually all vegetation.

It freaks out me out seeing TV shows from the US in particular where they have houses surrounded by trees with trees literally hanging over the house. The road leading out also has a beautiful canopy of trees right against the side of the road. They look like deathtraps to me but presumably they don't live in a walk-in tinderbox like some parts of Australia.

Yeah, it depends on the region, but here in my pretty wet part of SW Missouri we have "Red Flag" days (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_warning) when we have to be extra careful, but we're simply not in real danger of that sort of disaster, although I did remove the tree "literally hanging over the house" and damaging the roof of the house I recently bought that was built in 1910, that's just simple prudence in many dimensions.

But the house is still surrounded by trees, including a couple of giant maples in the back yard which need topping, then again this is in city neighborhood with 0.06 or a bit more hectare residential lots, without a good fire fighting service it would have eventually gotten burned out one way or another. We've even got one city, Somerville, MA, which has enough fuel density in its residential buildings to support a true firestorm (and I've watched their firefighters in action, they's good).

On the other hand, out in the drier western part of the country, in plenty of it people ought to take the sorts of precautions you outline, but of course many are complacent and expect the government to come to their rescue, are just willing to make the tradeoffs (many areas aren't that dry), or I'm sure in some cases are limited by zoning from doing the smart thing.

Here we also had many decades of insane government forestry polices where simply stopping all fires was the paradigm. You can guess what the eventual result was, as well as how dicey trying to do the first controlled burn of a fire suppressed area is....

When I was a kid at school in Auckland we had regular earthquake and volcano drills. I'm sure the earthquake drills are even more regular here in Wellington, we also have Tsunami sirens and every coastal suburb has lines on the roads and footpaths directing you to Tsunami safety zones.

It's amazing what people will put up with :)

Rather similar here in Tornado Alley, and put to the test in the smallish city I was born and raised in, and retired to in time for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado

Yeah, if you grow up with the threat, it's not that big a deal until one hits.

A few years ago I was flying to Russia from New Zealand, a friend of mine was flying to Ireland. Ironically we were both on the same flight from Auckland to Osaka, and then on the same flight from Osaka to Frankfurt. From Frankfurt our flights diverged.

In Osaka I was called to the checkout, where in typical Japanese efficiency they said there were some issues at Frankfurt and they had already printed my ticket for my next flight. This was a life saver.

Anyway, it turns out there was a huge snow storm and Frankfurt was having to cancel 500 flights a day. The place was like a refugee camp with thousands of people sleeping on stretchers, etc. The queue to talk to anyone or checkin lasted for hours, and people couldn't leave the airport because if your name was called for a flight you had to be there to take it. Every single flight in Europe's busiest airport were grounded except the Russians, the biggest snow storm in years was nothing and I only had to wait a couple of hours, my friend was there for a couple of days. So it really is amazing what you're used to.

Yes based on the Newcastle event that if we did get a medium sized earthquake in one of the large cities there would be a lot of damage and people killed.

Melbourne, Canberra and Perth look to be the most risky [1].

1. http://www.ga.gov.au/interactive-maps/#/theme/hazards/map/ea...

Australia is geologically quiet... too quiet.

Don't mention the snakes :O ... and spiders, box jellies and killer koalas. Ah white sharks and salt water crocs. Have I missed anything?

I'll probably get a visit from the Australian Secret Tourist Police for saying this to foreigners, but the danger is way overstated.

The last person that died from a spider bite was in 1979. Snakes and spiders mostly just want to left alone. Crocodiles and marine stingers only exist in the tropics, and Sharks only eat ocean swimmers.

I grew up very close to native bush land on the outskirts of Sydney and have never been 'prey' to another creature while playing in the bush.

Of course, I wouldn't have done that if drop-bears [1] were around though.

[1] http://australianmuseum.net.au/drop-bear

I grew up on the north coast of NSW in the bush and the big thing that used to scare me were death adders [1]. The bastards lie in wait in the leaf litter waiting for a bird to come down and grab their tail which they wave around like a worm. Unlike all the other snakes they don't run away when they hear you coming so they are easy to step on - the fact they are one of the most venomous snakes in the world is just the cherry on top.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acanthophis

> The last person that died from a spider bite was in 1979.

There was one this year, actually[1]. Non-fatal bites are more common, but there's no official statistics because it's not a reportable medical emergency.

Folks that live near bushland of any variety know to do the basics like not sticking your fingers into areas you can't see, and not weeding/digging in the garden within the Sydney region with bare hands.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/12/young-man-dies-af...

> [I] have never been 'prey' to another creature while playing in the bus

Survivor bias, mate.

Fun fact: the most common spider-related cause of death in Australia is not people being bitten, but a spider hiding in a car's sun visor, people opening said visor while driving and then crashing the car when the spider falls into their lap.

(BTH, this requires only one such fatal crash because nobody in Australia has died from a spider bite since 1979).

Drop bears?

More seriously, didn't Australia previously have some geological activity? I've heard of lava tubes near Cairns and have visited the Sunshine Coast where I believe there are (dormant?) volcanos?

Those volcanoes are a feature of the area, but they seem to be very much extinct, not dormant.

The deadliest animals in Australia, by far, are horses and cattle.

That's the secret Australians don't want you to know!

You don't have any deer like we in the US do, right? That's our deadest animal, through crashing with cars.

They have (imported) deer in NZ, but I'm not sure how widespread. The analogue of deer here in Aus are kangaroos, but they're not so deadly in a crash. Livestock are indeed our deadliest animals.

Most of our native wildlife is pretty sleepy and shy - there's only a couple of snakes that are aggressive; most run (slither?) away from humans. Apart from that, crocodiles are really only the remaining aggressive land animal, but there's not a lot of overlap between a population map of humans vs crocodiles here.

There's feral deer in the Australian Alps. I came across one in the middle of the road driving back from Thredbo very late one night.

Cassowaries can be pretty aggressive. Dingos are dangerous for children. Magpies are very aggressive but can only maim, not kill.

I thought about including cassowaries, but you generally have to provoke them - they don't usually hunt you down to attack you. Magpies swoop, sure, but that's not the kind of dangerous that people talk about.

Dingoes, fair enough, I missed those. They're opportunistic though, and you have to go looking for reports on attacks (apart from the obvious one, which was hard to escape the media frenzy of...). Dingo attacks a but a drop in the ocean compared to other (pet) dog attacks here.

Moose are significantly worse in car accidents than deer. But there are fewer of them and they're not in nearly as many regions so the overall numbers are far lower. But there are some places (Alaska, Maine, also Newfoundland in Canada) where they're a serious hazard.

There are deer in Australia, but if they're anything like the deer in New Zealand, they tend to stay well away from humans, since deer hunting is a lot less restricted (since they are introduced).

In my experience they're pretty shy, but there are so many of them, enough of them cross roads, and we have 13.5 times your population, with plenty of it in e.g. the fairly crowded North East where the old farms have returned to forest due to it being so much more efficient to farm out here in the mid-West, there are enough deer-car interactions to, well, wow, I just found this 2001 article, and per Wikipedia below, things have not gotten significantly better: http://reason.com/archives/2001/11/21/north-americas-most-da...

The most dangerous mammal in North America is...Bambi. The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that white-tailed deer kill around 130 Americans each year simply by causing car accidents. In 1994, these predator deer had a banner year, causing 211 human deaths in car wrecks.

There are about 1.5 million deer/vehicle collisions annually, resulting in 29,000 human injuries and more than $1 billion in insurance claims in addition to the death toll.

And here's Wikipedia on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer%E2%80%93vehicle_collision... They even kill around 20/year in Germany.

Kangaroos fill that niche here.

Wombats mess up cars pretty bad if you hit one.

But at least the land itself doesn't want to kill us.

Well, except when a beach tries to swallow you: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3250475/A-car-carava...

...or when your backyard tries to swallow you: https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2016/aug/02/news-foo...

That is an anecdote obviously, not a widespread danger.

I don't know where in Australia you live, but as someone currently doing earthquake and other natural hazard modeling for Australia - I think your confidence is unwarranted.

Well before Christchurch, there was a couple of decade stretch when Australia had had a more recent fatal quake than NZ.

This article is so full of factual errors it's not funny.

1) "Kaikoura, sixty miles north of Christchurch" - it's closer to 90 miles - in a straight line across the ocean. If you are driving, it's even further.

2) "The North Island, where the capital, Wellington, lies, is part of the Australian plate, and its landscape is dominated by two dozen active volcanoes." - 24 active volcanoes in the North Island? Pity that we're only monitoring 11 of them then. https://www.geonet.org.nz/volcano/

3) "that the earthquake, like the one that devastated Christchurch in 2010" - It happened in 2011. The initiating earthquake happened in 2010, yes, but the aftershock that killed people and brought down buildings in ChCh occurred on Feb 22 2011.

Per [1], the epicenter of the Kaikoura earthquake was 59 miles from Christchurch. The New Yorker article reads, "But Monday’s magnitude-7.8 earthquake, centered near Kaikoura, sixty miles north of Christchurch...". So perhaps an editing error (a misplaced modifier), rather than an outright blunder.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Kaikoura_earthquake

Regarding your point 2 - some of those are volcanic fields that contain multiple volcanoes.

Auckland volcanic field contains multiple extinct volcanoes, it's monogenetic.

Are we surprised that Mordor is a land full of fire and dragons?

> the Maori arrived, in the thirteenth century

Is the reason there's no inhabitants in NZ who arrived before 1300 AD because earthquakes and volcanos killed them all off? That big mountain island in the sea just off Auckland called Rangitoto only popped up about 600 years ago and its Maori name means "Bleeding into the Sky" so I guess they saw it all.

No, the Polynesian colonization of the pacific islands just happened pretty late in history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesia#History_of_the_Polyn...

Yes NZ was just about the last place on the planet discovered and settled by humans.

That's partly because the Polynesian settling of the Pacific was done from Taiwan across the north to the Americas and then back across the south

"to the Americas" -- do we have proof that they made it to the Americas?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/140318-polyn...

They brought kumara, a sweet potato, back to NZ with them from the Americas.

There's also possible evidence they brought chickens to Chile, and I believe some evidence of Polynesian canoe designs showing up in California

Maybe he meant Hawaii (now part of U.S., North America) and Easter Island (now part of Chile, South America)!

Harden up guys..

Still a million times better living here than most other places IMHO

Why? What makes it nice?

Imagine a tiny Canada with much better weather and an obsession with rugby instead of ice hockey.

No NSA, FBI, CIA, DHS, etc... /s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waihopai_Station may be of interest...

Um, NZ does have a huge amount of internet / phone spying, most so than many places and it's part of the five eyes, so I'd think twice before posting about what you don't understand.

I think I understand what NZ has, and while it may be deplorable...there are degrees of deplorable, and it's preferable to my(US citizen) current climate of deplorable.

LOL, we still have AOS, SIS, GCSB, AVSEC and of relevance to this article, EQNZ.

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