James' World 2

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Scary headlines about the Pacific Northwest sinking into the sea are circulating online, with warnings that a major earthquake in the notorious Cascadia subduction zone could be worse than expected.

What’s behind this new alarm? Fortunately, research has not uncovered a new risk that Seattle will become the Lost City of Atlantis. Instead, scientists have examined the combined effects of two well-known phenomena: sea-level rise from climate change and the likely consequences of a major earthquake in the region. It was already known that sea level along the coast of northern California, Oregon, and Washington State is estimated to rise by 1.3 to 2.9 feet by 2100 because of a warming climate. It was also well known that a magnitude 8 or higher earthquake in the area could cause the coastline to slump by up to 6.5 feet. What the new study, published on April 28 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, adds is an understanding of how much additional land would end up being at a high risk of flooding because of these two combined threats.

Why Does Sea-Level Rise Matter?

While the East Coast is already seeing the effects of beach erosion and rising sea levels, the Pacific Northwest (PNW) has been protected by its geology, so far. The coast that extends from northern California to Vancouver Island in British Columbia sits on a subduction zone where the Juan de Fuca, Explorer, and Gorda oceanic plates slip beneath the North American continental plate—parts of the ever-moving slabs of rock that make up our planet. Right now, the fault system is quiet, meaning it has not had a large earthquake for more than 300 years, and the coast is gradually rising by a few fractions of an inch each year. This geological uplift, a consequence of the interactions of the tectonic plates, outpaces sea-level rise in many areas, so the PNW has been relatively shielded from effects such as extreme flooding events or coastal erosion.

But over the past 7,000 years or so, at least 11 major earthquakes have struck the Cascadia region where these faults reside. The last of these temblors occurred in 1700, and geologists can still see evidence of it causing the coastline to drop between 1.6 and 6.5 feet in the blink of an eye. “We have these really rooted organic soils that are suddenly overlain by this really clean tidal mud, indicating they were suddenly dropped down and were buried and basically converted to tidal flats,” says Tina Dura, a coastal geologist at Virginia Tech and first author of the new study.

What no one had really studied, Dura says, was the combined effect of this sudden subsidence and the slower inundation caused by sea-level rise.

How Much of Cascadia Will Become Prone to Floods?

Dura and her colleagues looked at earthquake scenarios that would yield different ranges of subsidence, from 1.6 to 6.5 feet. They also compared such an earthquake’s effects at today’s sea levels with those at sea levels forecasted for 2100. By that time, sea-level rise is expected to outpace the geological uplift of the PNW and may reach as much as 2.9 feet.

The team found that if an earthquake that caused more than six feet of subsidence were to happen today, the 100-year floodplain in estuaries in Cascadia would expand by 115 square miles. Were this quake to happen in the year 2100, with the additional pressures of sea-level rise, those estuaries would expand by 145 square miles. That would be triple the flood-prone area that is seen today.

How Worried Should We Be?

In the event of a magnitude 8 quake in Cascadia, subsidence would not be the first issue on anyone’s mind. A large undersea quake could cause a devastating tsunami that would immediately threaten lives and structures. The new study is focused on areas within about six feet of elevation of the current 100-year floodplain, Dura says, and the earthquake-driven tsunami could be more than 30 feet high.

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Every evening at about 6:30 p.m., I pour my toddler a sippy cup of cold milk and we curl up on the couch next to my husband. “Mama sit!” he says, his way of asking to sit on my lap as he enjoys his milk and a movie of his choosing. It’s a joyful moment of family time, a carefree and cozy break at the end of our busy days.

When I learned that the Food and Drug Administration paused its quality testing on milk, my mind immediately went to our sweet family ritual. It rocked me. The testing pause comes after we learned that bird flu is spreading in dairy cows, traces of the killed virus in our commercial milk supply, which was another development that caused a spike in my anxiety and a late-night message to our pediatrician. I wondered what exactly this pause in testing meant, in the literal sense, and how long it would go on. I worried I would now spend that precious family time concerned about what was in my kid’s milk.

This particular threat is just one of many. From increasing grocery prices, shuttering Head Start programs, abortion bans that make pregnancy more dangerous, bringing back measles, not to mention the threat of gun violence in schools — there are many large ways that the Trump administration has made parents’ lives more difficult — and comparatively, concern over a sippy cup of milk might seem small.

But that smallness is part of what makes this new concern feel so particularly insidious.

Milk is a drink that, for many children, becomes an extension of the comforting bond they formed with their parent through breast- or bottle-feeding, a bridge from baby- to toddlerhood. I relish my son’s faint, milky breath before bedtime, and when I read about the FDA pause, my initial panic came in part from the fear that this tether to his early moments would be severed too soon.

These seemingly small issues like the milk testing are the ones that make the everyday lived experience of parenting feel less safe — and less joyful. It’s death by a thousand cuts.

Brittney Pagone, a former nurse and current stay-at-home mom who runs the Instagram page PAMoms4Change, felt a similar panic. The news alarmed her so much, she says, that she no longer plans to wean her nearly 1-year-old daughter, opting to breastfeed for longer rather than switching to whole milk. This is a privilege, she knows; she has both the time and the ability to breastfeed her daughter, two things many moms don’t have.

The confusion Pagone felt with this news, she says, is just another part of parenting under the current Trump administration, which is currently brewing plans to boost the national birth rate. Pagone finds the administration’s push for families to have more children, at the same time eliminating the safety nets that make it feasible, utterly infuriating.

The decision to breastfeed longer than she’d planned isn’t the only one Pagone has felt forced into because of the Trump administration. Her family recently took a vacation that was close enough to Texas that she requested her infant be vaccinated for measles early.

Meanwhile, the president, who has contemplated giving people $5,000 per child to encourage larger families, has taken to billing himself as the “fertilization president.” And as we struggle to navigate what feels like an increasingly dangerous environment for our children, the government goads us to have more.

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