Word: tsunami
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...influence of our genes, Lykken proposed the idea that each of us has a happiness set point much like our set point for body weight. No matter what happens in our life--good, bad, spectacular, horrific--we tend to return in short order to our set range. Some post-tsunami images last week of smiling Asian children returning to school underscored this amazing capacity to right ourselves. And a substantial body of research documents our tendency to return to the norm. A study of lottery winners done in 1978 found, for instance, that they did not wind up significantly happier...
...slab of the earth's crust known as the Juan de Fuca plate is trying to slide under continental North America. What they didn't appreciate until quite recently was that the juncture where the two plates are locked together can snap violently like a giant spring, unleashing a tsunami as large and terrifying as the one that pummeled South Asia...
...Geological Survey researcher Brian Atwater led the detective work that nailed down the tsunami-rich history of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, finding such clues as Native-American fire pits buried under a layer of tsunami sand three centuries ago and linking them to Japanese records of what appears to be the same tsunami striking villages on Honshu in January...
Cascadia has been relatively quiet ever since--which can be interpreted as good news or bad, given a geological record showing that the time between Cascadian tsunamis ranges from 200 to 1,000 years. Canadian geophysicists are still puzzling over a series of rhythmic tremors they identified a couple of years ago beneath the floor of Puget Sound. They don't know what caused them, but they think the tremors may be associated with rising stress along the fault. A bit of subterranean rustling doesn't mean that a great earthquake is imminent, of course, but the tsunami warning signs...
...EARTHQUAKE FACTORY The Cascadia Subduction Zone???where the Juan de Fuca Plate meets the North American Plate???is remarkably similar to the subterranean system that triggered the tsunami in the Indian Ocean and is capable of generating equally powerful earthquakes and equally destructive waves Some key differences: a tsunami???warning system, better housing construction and a more rugged and less populous coastline. The death toll from a tsunami in the Pacific Northwest might be in the hundreds but not in the tens of thousands...