The Northwest has the potential for earthquakes as big as anywhere in the world. Hyndman's books with David Alt have helped popularize a complex subject. Both guides help make sense of a crazy quilt of rock types resulting from the geologic smashup that we call Washington. Discoveries by scientists are slowly percolating into not just earthquake planning but into building codes, land-use decisions, shoreline management and environmental understanding. Still, to those of us who struggle to spell metamorphic rock, let alone identify it, geology can seem a bit dusty.
Geologists counter that our oceans, our atmosphere and our climate all ultimately come from rocks.
One theory is that the joining of North and South America triggered enough climate change in distant Africa to jump-start human evolution. Because the present position of drifting continents tends to block easy ocean flow between the warm equator and cold poles, conditions have favored the creation of Northern Hemisphere ice ages for the past 2 million years. At least five and maybe as many as 20 glaciations have marched into Western Washington. Human civilization has risen in a brief interglacial period of relative warmth. But in the meantime, we're enjoying it here, trying to understand the risk from infrequent but catastrophic events.