By Stephen Phillips | For The Oregonian/OregonLive

If you're anything like me, until 2015, earthquakes were strictly someone else's problem -- California's to be precise, site of the fabled San Andreas Fault, land of buckled freeways, and locale for about every earthquake disaster movie ever made.

Then came Kathryn Schulz's "The Really Big One" in The New Yorker. It's not often a 6,000-word piece heavy on geophysics goes viral, but this one sent alarm through Portland and the greater Northwest (and won Schulz a Pulitzer Prize): Actually, the region most at risk from a truly calamitous tremor was our own.

Two years later, now that the panic provoked by the article has receded, come two riveting books about earthquakes. Between them, they offer a visceral glimpse of the potential devastation should the really big one strike plus a reminder we're not alone; much of the rest of the U.S. is haunted by the same seismic specter, though this is scant reason for complacency.

"The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet" (Crown, 288 pages, $28), by New York Times science writer Henry Fountain, documents the 1964 Alaska earthquake. It's been slighted by history because of its comparatively low death toll, 131; the most lethal earthquake ever recorded, in 1556 in China, is thought to have killed 830,000.

But at 9.2 in magnitude the Alaska quake was the second most powerful in recorded history and most consequential in contributing to our understanding of the mostly imperceptible but occasionally convulsive forces that have hewn the world in which we live.

Fountain atmospherically depicts life in the frontier communities, Native Alaskan fishing village Chenega and port town Valdez, that were razed when "the earth (rang) like a bell" for five minutes (California's 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake was over in 15 seconds). He captures the sheer sensory oddness of an earthquake. Accounts of the earth bucking, bridling and swooning make animist explanations -- in Native American tradition, the lumbering stride of a tortoise bearing the world on its carapace, writes Fountain -- quite apt. And the narrative is haunted by images that live long in the mind, not least a crimson tide of dead red snapper flushed from the roiling depths.

But "The Great Quake" is also detective story: What caused land to be shoved seven-and-a-half feet upward in some places and five feet down in others across "an area the size of Indiana"?

Enter the U.S. Geological Survey's George Plafker. Through his ability to "read rocks," he divines the mechanism behind the tremor: the ocean floor compacting the "continental crust" until the latter gave way. In doing so, he supplies elusive empirical validation of the theory of plate tectonics -- that the Earth is fissured with grinding plates -- described by Fountain as "the unifying theory for all the geological features and processes that humans have wondered about for centuries."

The Alaska quake also bequeathed sharper understanding of our earthquake risk in the Northwest. Here, "conditions are similar," writes Fountain. "Rather than the large Pacific plate, however, three smaller oceanic plates are sliding under the North American continental plate in an area called the Cascadia subduction zone. Stresses are building up, just as they did in Alaska until March 27, 1964." Except this is not sparsely populated wilderness but, Fountain notes, urban corridor.

No less engaging is Kathryn Miles' "Quakeland: On the Road to America's Next Devastating Earthquake" (Dutton, 368 pages, $28), an earthquake-themed road trip that is popular science in the Mary Roach mold: the writer as intrepid explorer of science and amiable, wisecracking proxy for the lay reader.

Miles offers another corrective to the California-centric narrative of earthquake risk, except her version focuses mostly away from the West Coast. Earthquakes are equal-opportunity assailants, she writes, imperiling not only the usual suspects but also America's heartland and Northeast. A seam of faults in Missouri notches 200 tremors a year while New York is "positively vivisected by faults," Miles writes. On the East Coast, quakes tend to be gentler, she adds, but amid a bigger population, and denser rock that transmits their force farther, they're considered riskier.

Then there's the emerging hazard of anthropogenic earthquakes triggered by resource extraction such as mining and quarrying. The contribution of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," to this "induced seismicity" remains disputed, but that of the burial of wastewater from fracking and drilling for oil and gas is widely accepted, and Oklahoma, the site of intensive oil and gas exploration, is now the "most seismically active state in the lower 48," Miles writes.

Running like a fault line through "Quakeland" is our lamentable state of earthquake preparedness amid aging infrastructure, much of it in seismically imprudent locations; cursory emergency planning; and lax building codes.

Historically, this nonchalance may be traced back to the gulf between geological and human time.

"Imagine you're a mayfly born on a river in Colorado," geologist Jake Lowenstern tells Miles. "You're around for a day. You mate and die. Do you believe that there's such a thing as a snow storm? As war? That's stuff you're never going to experience. Humans are like that with respect to earth processes."

As Fountain and Miles show, we're losing our innocence fast.

More earthquake coverage: oregonlive.com/earthquakes