In the “Tectonic Summary” section of a US Geological Survey page on the 3.9 magnitude earthquake that struck the Gulf of Mexico’s seafloor about 200 miles from the outermost mudflats of Louisiana’s river delta lands on Sunday night, a seismologist with the agency puts the gulf’s temporary name right up front with “This earthquake occurred beneath the Gulf of America, far from the nearest active plate boundary. Such intraplate (mid-plate) earthquakes are infrequent compared to those that occur along plate-boundary faults and likely reflect the release of long-term tectonic stresses ultimately generated at the plate margins. This event is among the largest of more than a dozen earthquakes instrumentally recorded in the eastern Gulf of America over the past five decades.”

“The largest significant earthquake in the region occurred on September 10, 2006, with a magnitude of 5.9. No specific causative fault has been identified for this recent earthquake,” the summary continued and no, there’s no chance of that “specific causative fault” or faults ever generating a tsunami let alone one that would ever do any more damage than a hurricane storm surge.

The real issue here is, as mentioned, some kid who grew up fascinated by earthquakes, studying really hard, having to learn the names and compositions of sedimentary rocks and other boring substrates that have nothing to do with seismology, landing a dream opportunity with the premier government geological agency on the planet, putting in the hours and working their way up the ladder by compiling these summaries of events – and then having to write “Gulf of America” instead of “Mexico” by some political appointee who may or may not have dropped out of college and then became an anti-“cancel culture” podcaster. That the real work of monitoring and examining the moods and intemperance of the merciless orb under our feet has been infected by the mindless impulses of the plague of red-hatted locusts that claim it their dominion. May the Earth inherit them.