You can get those in your neck of the woods, can't you? Do you get meandering slow moving lava with tourist potential, or torrential pyroclastic flows that race down valleys and obliterate towns entirely?
Yes, and yes. We get lave like Kileauea's, we get lave that flows like pudding, we get lave that squeezes out like the earth's turds and goes tumbling down the slope, deforming as it goes until it stops with a heavy dull 'splut' somewhere, we get lava so thick it oozes out so slowly that gases eventually blow it out was lava bombs and cinder -- or sometimes sets up in the vent, so the magma finds another place to pop out; we get ash and cinder and pumice and pyroclastic flows. Some of our volcanoes pump out only two or three of those, a few have done all of them.
And occasionally we get a blast that turns a mountain that would bury Manhattan into so much sand and ash and dust and pebbles and scatters it over five states -- haven't had one in a while, but when the settlers got here the natives told about one, which no one really believed until some geologists decided to actually looked at what was left of the mountain. Since then they've found two more, side by side, and at least one which shows the right signs to be a candidate for doing the same thing one day.
If you don't mind, I think I'll stick with Vancouver Island Earthquakes...two or three weeks in duration, releasing a huge amount of strain, but so subtle that seismologists only realized they exist since the last few years of detailed GPS surveys...They're below the detection thresholds of standard-issue seismographs. The easy shimmy-quake! What's not to like?
Historically, there have been quakes as large as 8.5 within fifty miles of the Oregon coast. There are places that have risen as much as two meters, and dropped back over time, five or six times that are evident. There are traces of tsunamis that scoured everything from the coastal plain clear to the mountains, and forests snapped off at shoulder height and then buried in another meter of sediment. There are stretches with buried boulders that didn't get that way from sediment, but because the ground liquefied and the boulders
sank. There are formation here where lava sits on sandstone, sandstone sits on the lave, more lave sits on that sandstone, river deposited mudstone conglomerate sits on that lava, and more lava sits on top -- and the bottom and top lavas were plainly deposited above sea level, but the middle one just as plainly erupted under water, and just for variety, if you know what you're looking for, "level" was different for each of those lava flows.
I'll take the volcano over the quake.
Especially since there's evidence that more than once a big quake apparently triggered one or more volcanoes.
There is a mount within the Portland city limits that was once a volcano. Geologists considered it dead, until once back during St. Helens' glory days, the parking lot on the top was getting hot -- enough that it melted some car tires. I'd really rather that one didn't erupt.
](/images/smilies/bang.gif "Brick wall ](*,)")
