The Cascadia Initiative: A Sea Change In Seismological Studies of Subduction Zones

Increasing public awareness that the Cascadia subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest is capable of great earthquakes (magnitude 9 and greater) motivates the Cascadia Initiative, an ambitious onshore/offshore seismic and geodetic experiment that takes advantage of an amphibious array to study questions ranging from megathrust earthquakes, to volcanic arc structure, to the formation, deformation and hydration of the Juan De Fuca and Gorda Plates. Here, we provide an overview of the Cascadia Initiative, including its primary science objectives, its experimental design and implementation, and a preview of how the resulting data are being used by a diverse and growing scientific community. The Cascadia Initiative also exemplifies how new technology and community-based experiments are opening up frontiers for marine science. The new technology—shielded ocean bottom seismometers—is allowing more routine investigation of the source zone of megathrust earthquakes, which almost exclusively lies offshore and in shallow water. The Cascadia Initiative offers opportunities and accompanying challenges to a rapidly expanding community of those who use ocean bottom seismic data.This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by the Oceanography Society and can be found at: http://www.tos.org/oceanography/index.html

Natural law, state formation and the foundations of social theory

This article proceeds from the claim that the earliest examples of sociological method were linked by a critique of the theories of natural law proposed in the Enlightenment. It illustrates this point by surveying the rise of social theory in the aftermath of the French Revolution and by examining approaches to natural law in key texts in the history of sociology. However, the article claims that natural law remains a blind spot for sociological method, and the original sociological dismissal of natural law as a formal body of normative postulates has prevented the formation of sociology as a comprehensive system of social interpretation. Using a series of historical examples, the article then argues that natural law theory needs in itself to be viewed sociologically, and, throughout modern history, ius-natural thinking has served not only to establish formal norms for evaluating social and political practices, but also to form the positive preconditions for the evolution of contemporary society in its distinctive differentiated form. The article concludes by arguing that a sociological reconstruction of natural law points the way towards a sociological theory of theory, which has typically proved elusive for sociological methodologies