Are there relatively "Safe" places to live?

Here is a list of five, with reasons why:

5 countries with the lowest risk of disaster

Watching the events unfold in Japan and Libya has probably given a lot of people reason to consider their own safety, wherever they live. “What if that happened where I live?” is a perfectly natural question to ask when faced with wall-to-wall coverage of horrible devastation.

It’s true that no place is perfect, and there are always going to be some risks wherever you are in the world, whether it’s California, Indonesia, or London… but if you’ve been thinking about a move overseas, and the events in Japan and Libya have you wondering which countries run the lowest risk of destruction, read on.

* To be clear, what follows is not an exhaustive list, just a few countries that stand out as being particularly low risk for destructive natural disasters, nuclear meltdown, terrorism, or Qadaffi tactics. [...]

Follow the link to read about the five. Some of them may surprise you. The first one has been a favorite of mine for a while.
     

Russia's interest: it's the ports

It's not their only interest, but understanding the importance of the two ports is one of the keys to understanding Russia's actions:

The Link Between Putin’s Military Campaigns in Syria and Ukraine

[...] Both Sevastopol and Tartus play a role in compensating for Russia’s geographic deficiencies as well. “Russia’s always had the challenge of not having great maritime access, just as a result of its geography, and so to the extent that it wants to be an active player in [the Mediterranean] … it has to have some ability to operate outside of its own coastal waters,” Mankoff explained. This ambition is enshrined in Russia’s new maritime strategy, detailed in the Maritime Doctrine of the Russian Federation 2020. The strategy places particular emphasis on the Atlantic Ocean due to “NATO expansion, the need to integrate Crimea and the Sevastopol naval base into the Russian economy, and to re-establish a permanent Russian Navy presence in the Mediterranean,” according to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin. The doctrine also stresses the importance of the Arctic, given its mineral resources and the easy access it offers to both the Atlantic and Pacific.

All this isn’t to suggest that naval strategy is the primary motivation behind Russia’s interventions to support pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine and Assad in Syria. In the case of Syria, Putin has a track record of opposing Islamist movements like ISIS (in fact, that track record is one of the factors that brought him to power in the first place). Mankoff suggested that Russia’s Syria policy could be a mix of the personal and the political, saying, “If Putin believes that Assad is his guy and that he has a personal obligation to him, then that may play a role above and beyond what the professional diplomats and strategic thinkers believe is going on here.” Additionally, Mankoff argued that the Russian government might be deliberately trying to draw a comparison between its unflinching support of Assad and America’s brittle support of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, which dissipated during the Arab Spring. [...]

Read the whole thing for embedded links and more. I've posted previously about Russian Geography and History, that broader context also explains a lot. You can read that post here:

Russia, geography and history

     

Russia, geography and history

When history repeats itself, it's sometimes for geographical reasons. This article explains a lot:



Russia and the Curse of Geography
Want to understand why Putin does what he does? Look at a map.

Vladimir Putin says he is a religious man, a great supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church. If so, he may well go to bed each night, say his prayers, and ask God: “Why didn’t you put mountains in eastern Ukraine?”

If God had built mountains in eastern Ukraine, then the great expanse of flatland that is the European Plain would not have been such inviting territory for the invaders who have attacked Russia from there repeatedly through history. As things stand, Putin, like Russian leaders before him, likely feels he has no choice but to at least try to control the flatlands to Russia’s west. So it is with landscapes around the world—their physical features imprison political leaders, constraining their choices and room for maneuver. These rules of geography are especially clear in Russia, where power is hard to defend, and where for centuries leaders have compensated by pushing outward.

Western leaders seem to have difficulty deciphering Putin’s motives, especially when it comes to his actions in Ukraine and Syria; Russia’s current leader has been described in terms that evoke Winston Churchill’s famous 1939 observation that Russia “is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside of an enigma.” But it’s helpful to look at Putin’s military interventions abroad in the context of Russian leaders’ longstanding attempts to deal with geography. What if Putin’s motives aren’t so mysterious after all? What if you can read them clearly on a map?

[...]

Just as strategically important—and just as significant to the calculations of Russia’s leaders throughout history—has been the country’s historical lack of its own warm-water port with direct access to the oceans. Many of the country’s ports on the Arctic freeze for several months each year. Vladivostok, the largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean, is enclosed by the Sea of Japan, which is dominated by the Japanese. This does not just halt the flow of trade into and out of Russia; it prevents the Russian fleet from operating as a global power, as it does not have year-round access to the world’s most important sea-lanes.

[...]

Two of Russia’s chief preoccupations—its vulnerability on land and its lack of access to warm-water ports—came together in Ukraine in 2014. As long as a pro-Russian government held sway in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, Russia could be confident that its buffer zone would remain intact and guard the European Plain. Even a neutral Ukraine, which would promise not to join the European Union or NATO and would uphold the lease Russia had on the warm-water port at Sevastopol in Crimea, would be acceptable. But when protests in Ukraine brought down the pro-Russia government of Viktor Yanukovych and a new, more pro-Western government came to power, Putin had a choice. He could have respected the territorial integrity of Ukraine, or he could have done what Russian leaders have done for centuries with the bad geographic cards they were dealt. He chose his own kind of attack as defense, annexing Crimea to ensure Russia’s access to its only proper warm-water port, and moving to prevent NATO from creeping even closer to Russia’s border.

The same geographic preoccupations are visible now in Russia’s intervention in Syria on behalf of Putin’s ally, Bashar al-Assad. The Russians have a naval base in the port city of Tartus on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. If Assad falls, Syria’s new rulers may kick them out. Putin clearly believes the risk of confronting NATO members in another geographic sphere is worth it.

Russia has not finished with Ukraine yet, nor Syria. From the Grand Principality of Moscow, through Peter the Great, Stalin, and now Putin, each Russian leader has been confronted by the same problems. [...]

Read the whole thing for embedded links, lots of maps, and more. It really explains a lot. I'm not arguing that what Russia is doing is right or wrong. I am saying that when you look at the maps and the history, it is understandable. Russia has it's reasons, in the past and the present. Anyone who really wants to understand what is happening and why, needs to look at the larger picture and take these very real concerns into consideration.

     

Southern End of Cascadia Fault More Unstable

And thus more likely to have a quake soon:

Northwest Earthquake Risk in U.S. Looms Large: 40% Chance of Major Earthquake Within 50 Years

ScienceDaily (Aug. 1, 2012) — A comprehensive analysis of the Cascadia Subduction Zone off the Pacific Northwest coast confirms that the region has had numerous earthquakes over the past 10,000 years, and suggests that the southern Oregon coast may be most vulnerable based on recurrence frequency.

[...]

"The southern margin of Cascadia has a much higher recurrence level for major earthquakes than the northern end and, frankly, it is overdue for a rupture," said Chris Goldfinger, a professor in OSU's College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and lead author of the study. "That doesn't mean that an earthquake couldn't strike first along the northern half, from Newport, Ore., to Vancouver Island.

"But major earthquakes tend to strike more frequently along the southern end -- every 240 years or so -- and it has been longer than that since it last happened," Goldfinger added. "The probability for an earthquake on the southern part of the fault is more than double that of the northern end."

[...]

The Goldfinger-led study took four years to complete and is based on 13 years of research. At 184 pages, it is the most comprehensive overview ever written of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a region off the Northwest coast where the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate is being subducted beneath the continent. Once thought to be a continuous fault line, Cascadia is now known to be at least partially segmented.

This segmentation is reflected in the region's earthquake history, Goldfinger noted.

"Over the past 10,000 years, there have been 19 earthquakes that extended along most of the margin, stretching from southern Vancouver Island to the Oregon-California border," Goldfinger noted. "These would typically be of a magnitude from about 8.7 to 9.2 -- really huge earthquakes.

"We've also determined that there have been 22 additional earthquakes that involved just the southern end of the fault," he added. "We are assuming that these are slightly smaller -- more like 8.0 -- but not necessarily. They were still very large earthquakes that if they happened today could have a devastating impact." [...]

This fits in with a previous post I did, "Oregon Tsunami Inundation Maps and Reports", which referenced the Gorda plate, a seismic zone that extends from Southern Oregon to Northern California. More plates, more faults, thus more activity.
     

See "The 8 Most Terrifying Holes on Earth "

This sink-hole in Guatemala, that swallowed 12 homes is truly scary:


The 8 Most Terrifying Holes on Earth
Follow the link to see them all. The one at the end of the list is perhaps the most horrible of all, because of it's size, location, and seemingly endless capacity.