I was watching the Beeb (BBC) a few days ago, and their coverage of the Myanmar EQ, and I noticed that they (British Broadcasting Corporation) were using mapping proclaiming across the bottom that it was provided by the USGS. now, no issues with the USGS per se , but considering that the news programme spent more time talking about the various shutdowns of US government departments, I wondered how long it would be before the barbarians got to the gates of the USGS and started sacking them and shutting down (or geo-blocking) their servers.
Short-sighted ; self-harming etc are all appropriate comments, and are accepted as made already.
That doesn’t mean the multiply-bankrupt office-chair-warmers won’t see the whole department as a waste of money, and shut it down.
When they notice it.
Which is likely to be after a major EQ globally, or a minor one in downtown LA. If there’s another New Madrid sequence, it might be safe (for a while), but frankly, a minor shake in downtown LA is more likely.
Anyway, I wrote to the Beeb, making these points, and linking to EMSC-CSEM.eu. I also had to link to the British Geological Survey (because “British”, BrExit, etc) who aren’t “big” on earthquakes, because it’s not a big problem in Britain.
(There was a “five.several” in the Central North Sea when I worked on the oil rigs, so I put out a call for reports from the installation control rooms,watch-standers etc. Nobody noticed anything. Nobody had considered the question of, say, would an EQ rock a platform’s legs, or possibly spring a seal on a pipeline. “Bloody trouble-making trade union geologists” was the general tone of response.)
If, as I anticipate, the USGS get shut down, sacked, and their database servers switched off and sold for bitcoin mining, will other countries Geol.Surveys have the data replicated and ready to work as “failover” servers?
The Beeb wrote back to me today, saying they’d escalated my letter to the next level up of apparatchiks . Which may mean nothing, or it may mean that someone at CSEM gets a phone-call from Manchester in very bad French.