Isn't ole dreaded YELLOWSTONE Supervolcano in that general area?

I mean on the North american plate, on the upper west side of the nation.

Boom. I've seen the simulations.. the biblical days of darkness, the ash would spread across the entire globe's atmosphere.

Crops would be dead, starvation would set in at certain troubled regions. In western society in the cities on the Eastern U.S. and Midwest, chaos rioting and anarchy would ensue..

Yellowstone is fed by a hotspot to the best of my knowledge, similar to how Hawaii is. This is mainly about the Cascade region of Volcanoes. It can be seen in this screenshot from Google earth:



the curving set of volcanoes, (red Triangles) which separates from the Cascades region, is from the hotspot that fuels Yellowstone.

Why had I never realised the Hawaiian chain was that long? there is a total length there of about 3600 miles.

But the Cascades are from a subduction zone, so pretty much the same spot will be active for as long as there is magma to feed it, but in the zone where the new crust rises and the Juan de Fuca plate sinks below the American plate. At these points earthquakes will occur.

I'm glad it hasn't hit... yet.

Something that hasn't been talked about a lot is the fact that scientists still don't know if the kind of tremors they've been seeing are forerunners of major quakes or if they actually help relieve the stresses that cause major quakes.

When you've got a lot of pressure building up, it's better to have it slip away a little at a time than to get it all at once, right?

Of course, it still means that times of activity are higher risk, but we still don't understand enough to say that one leads to the other.