Have you heard the latest in disaster developments? No, it's not a virus. No, it's not an asteroid, and no, it's not Dr. Evil's new reality show. This particular end game is definitely gonna go down. Someday. Earthquake. An earthquake is absolutely guaranteed to mess everything up in the South Sound. For 300 years the shifting crust of the Earth off the coast of the Pacific Northwest has been building up the momentum for another giant earthquake. The last big one in the region, a magnitude 9.0 quake in 1700, rocked the Northwest, possibly causing the legendary Bonneville Landslide that covered more than five square miles (south of Table Mountain), and unleashing a tsunami on Japan. Wednesday, Sept. 10, Jeff McGuire, a geophysicist with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution of Massachusetts, will give a lecture about what could be the next major earthquake in the region, why it is so hard to predict, and what scientists are doing to change this. It might be a good time to head to Massachusetts. Don't forget the 401k.

SEAFLOOR SEISMIC AND GEODETIC EXPERIMENTS ON THE CASCADIA MEGATHRUST, 7-9 p.m., Thompson Hall, Room 175, on the University of Puget Sound campus, 1550 N. Warner, Tacoma, free admission, 253.879.3236