Thank you for this.

Pacific-Rim quake is [literally] several magnitudes worse for humans in every possible way compared to a fracking-generated quake.

@2: The issue with earthquakes caused by fracking and injection wells isn't the magnitude, but the quantity. You get a bunch of little earthquakes that don't level city blocks, but occur very frequently and cause minor damage while also presenting a constant hazard to life and limb. An expert on the topic came to my school and gave a talk, and his assessment of the situation was that funding to study the issue would miraculously appear just as soon as a large TV fell on a small child during the quakes, but wouldn't be available until such a wholly unnecessary accident.

I hope "science news" becomes a regular feature.

I s'pose I'll do my usual voice-in-the-wilderness thing and request again that at some appropriate point, new staff writers and/or regular contributors get introduced by the editor, or introduce themselves.

The youngsters don't set much store by ceremony (to use an appropriately hoary idiom) and we use Twitter to bleat at absolutely anyone without so much as a how-d'you-do, but intros are still a polite and civilized thing in meatspace, so why not extend that to dead-tree journalism and its webby shadow.

It simply facilitates conversation to know a little about someone's background—where they studied, where they worked, a few links to past work or achievements they're proud of, maybe something of their motivations and goals at present.

If people really want to prepare for "The Really Big One", they should read this article:
The First Five Minutes (March 2016), a first-person researched narrative about how our looming 9.0 would impact Portland, ...and how long it would take help to arrive...

Pretty good eye opener that makes you seriously re-consider how much food & water you have stashed.

It echoes a similar article published in the Portland Mercury in 2012, called "The First Four Minutes". But the 2016 version is much more thorough and has updated info on Portland's new Emergency Operations Center.

I agree with #1 & #4. Science news is a wonderful addition to Slog, with actual facts and apparent knowledge being conveyed. I clicked on Ethan Linck's name, which eventually led me to this too-short "bio":
Note:
I'm a graduate student in the UW Department of Biology and also have a blog, Beyond the Ranges, that, among other things, concerns phytogeography. But how about a real introduction here?

More of this, please.