The conversation spans volcanic hazards, with Dvorak identifying Mount Rainier's ice cap as capable of sending mudflows into Seattle's suburbs, and recounting standing inside Indonesia's Galunggung crater hours before it exploded in 1982. On NASA's New Horizons findings, he confesses expecting a cratered billiard ball at Pluto and was stunned by active geology driven by an unknown heat source, suggesting a possible internal ocean. Dvorak calls the multiverse potentially the century's biggest discovery, noting that quantum computers could only be explained by parallel universes and that gravity waves might cross between dimensions.
A scientist equally at home inside volcanic craters and behind telescope eyepieces, delivering hard data with infectious wonder.
Key Moments
Why the San Andreas movie undersells the real shaking: Dvorak - a USGS earthquake-and-volcano veteran - tells Art the running, jumping, and standing scenes in the San Andreas film are wrong: real strong-motion accelerations exceed 1g, putting people into momentary free fall, and you simply can't run during a great quake.
Earthquake storms - the 1939–1999 Turkey sequence as a model for the San Andreas: Dvorak introduces 'earthquake storms' through the North Anatolian Fault sequence: 13 major quakes in 60 years cascading along the fault, and explains why most California seismologists, himself included, view it as the closest analog for what the San Andreas will eventually do.
California's 20th-century seismic lull is ending: Dvorak walks through the numbers: 15 magnitude-5.5+ quakes in California from 1840–1906, only one in the next 70 years, and five in the most recent 35 - evidence that the unusual quiet during California's urban expansion is breaking down. The Hayward Fault, last big in 1868, now sits under 1.2 million people.
Cascadia: 200 years of silence and what it likely means: Dvorak ties Sumatra's 2001-onward storm of six magnitude-8 quakes to the Pacific Northwest, where the Cascadia subduction zone has been seismically quiet for 200 years and is expected to produce not one but a multi-decade cluster of great earthquakes.
Why nuclear weapons can't trigger the San Andreas: Asked if a nuclear test on the San Andreas could set the whole fault off, Dvorak points to the 1971 Cannikin test in the Aleutians - equivalent to a magnitude-6 quake - which feared aftershocks never came, and explains the physics: a bomb is an impulse, an earthquake is a slide.