New Geologic Map Reveals Portland's Deep History | Hacker News Reader

New Geologic Map Reveals Portland's Deep History

usgs.gov

After reading this, I searched for and found this report on earthquake impact from 2018 (for both "the big one" and a smaller, 6.8 portland hills quake), I believe based on the OP referenced data:

https://www.oregongeology.org/pubs/ofr/p-O-18-02.htm

All I can say is: yikes!

That is terrifying! What's interesting is the damage from the 6.8 magnitude Portland Hills Fault earthquake is simulated to be much greater for me than the 9.0 Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake.

Funny to see this hit the front page. Last week I started binge watching Nick Zentner on YouTube. He's a geology professor at Central Washington Uni and offers some fascinating expositions on PNW geology. The PNW has an absolutely riveting geologic story, including supervolcanoes and continental accretion.

Links for the lazy:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=nick+zentner

Supervolcanoes in the Pacific Northwest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcreTTI9Rew

Great Earthquakes of the Pacific Northwest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ7Qc3bsxjI

Supercontinents and the Pacific Northwest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg69QbPxHsA

This data is in a GeMS standard database, so it should be relatively easy to do fun things with it like importing it with Postgresql GIS, making Quake levels, or whatever.

I live within the boundaries of this map. I'd love it if there was a way to input an address (or zip code) and get a report of the findings for that area. Right now I'm trying to guesstimate where my house might be on the map and it's not easy to tell.

There is an app for that. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rockd/id1153056624 It may not have the most up to date info in this map but it does show the geologic info for your location.

What a great app! Thank you for the link!

Also on Android!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.macrostrat...

So much potential to make something far more interactive and integrated for education and outreach. Tying together map layers, map commentary, deposit descriptions, interactive vocabulary aids with photographs, history descriptions, timeline, and more. Site and close-up photos, videos and 360's. StreetViews and peoples' scenic photos - Google VR Earth. Stories and art. XR 3D site captures and in-hand XR models. XR regional cross-sectional models - seeing crust and mantle structure beneath your feet.

And then there's shallow but broad - "I see you are surfing from near Mumble, XX N XX W. Let me tell you the amazing deep-time story of the rocks you're standing on...". Ah well, eventually, some decade.

Traditionally field geologists (with the notable exception of the oil exploration kind) have been paid in scenery instead of in scrip.

IOW: excellent idea, when do you start?

> when do you start?

<Bemused look> Err... I've penciled it in, right after transformatively improving how scale is taught K-undergrad, and creating a nucleons-up through materials leaning progression for K-6 ??? Not really... though I do wish I could find a community interested in such.

I sometimes see discussion threads, "describe a side project that you'd really like to see happen, but don't have time for, so that your documentation, and the group's critique, might set up and motivate someone else to take it on". I don't know that I've ever seen that on HN. And while there are some hackathons in geology, I don't quickly find any for geology education or outreach. Maybe the current trend towards virtual hackathons will encourage such.

Although it's not as customizable based on fine-grained location, the USGS (not Ray Wells, the geologist who compiled the map, but his colleagues) are working on making what they call geonarratives or story maps (which is an ESRI trademarked product). These are interactive webmaps that also have a lot of narrative content (prose and pictures) that you can read through in a start-to-finish type of way, or browse the map and click on spots, seeing that part of the narrative.

They are focusing right now on making these that describe geologic hazards such as Cascadia subduction zone earthquakes and attendant 'secondary perils' such as tsunamis, landslides, and liquefaction, all of which have different geographic distributions and types of impacts.

The big hold-up with this is not really technological, it's that it takes a lot of time to write the damn content, make the maps and charts, and edit the photos. But on the (information) technical side, there are still a lot of cool things that can be done within webmaps or similar interfaces, showing interactive geologic events and having sliders for different times, or whatever.

Interesting - thanks.

> story maps (which is an ESRI trademarked product)

For the curious, given the phrase's use various settings, the trademarks are "Story Map Basic, Story Map Cascade, Story Map Crowdsource, Story Map Journal, Story Map Shortlist, Story Map Spyglass, Story Map Swipe, Story Map Series, Story Map Tour".

> it takes a lot of time to write the damn content

Indeed. One can imagine infrastructure and tooling to make it easier at scale, or even to enable broad collaboration, but fundable project scope is so much narrower.

A related challenge is when site preservation, and neighbor relations and access, depend on location obscurity (I'm in Boston). That doesn't mesh well with "immersive field trip on the web" and "see geology near you - a national field trip wiki".

> a lot of cool things that can be done within webmaps or similar interfaces

Nod. Especially if XR provides an infrastructure for integrated geolocated content. "Roadside geology" guides might become more like current leaf identification apps - "point at leaf, get story of tree" become "point at rock or rock face, get story of continents". Hmm, neat, there's a bunch of current research on ML rock type identification, even with mobile nets.

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