Just a reminder that our stupid, petty concerns count as nothing — no, make that less than nothing — in the larger picture:

Scientists listening to underwater microphones have detected an unusual swarm of earthquakes off central Oregon, something that often happens before a volcanic eruption — except there are no volcanoes in the area.

Scientists don’t know exactly what the earthquakes mean,but they could be the result of molten rock rumbling away from the recognized earthquake faults off Oregon, said Robert Dziak, a geophysicist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Oregon State University.

There have been more than 600 quakes over the past 10 days in a basin 150 miles southwest of Newport. The biggest was magnitude 5.4, and two others were more than magnitude 5.0, OSU reported.

Dziak says the sounds are “unlike anything scientists have heard in 17 years of listening,” which somehow doesn’t surprise me. Seventeen years isn’t even a nanosecond in geological time. What ignorant clowns we are. Earthquakes and volcanoes on the West coast that buried the continent in ash and cinders would matter not a whit to the Universe.