Although there’s a range of predictions for the Big One, that is roughly twice as high as some of the most severe previously considered scenarios. According to their research, that suggests that the tsunami triggered by the earthquake could reach higher than 200 feet (61 meters). The site, according to the authors, has a fairly large outer wedge (running between 15 and 43km). Photograph: Mark Goodnow/AFP/Getty Images The Cascadia subduction zone runs from Vancouver Island in Canada (pictured) to northern California. Its last Big One was in 1700, and current estimates point to about a 15% chance of a 9.0-magnitude earthquake in the next 50 years.Ī 2015 Pulitzer prize-winning New Yorker article brought widespread attention to the subduction zone, describing its next full-scale quake “as the worst natural disaster in the history of North America, outside of the 2010 Haiti earthquake”. It runs from Vancouver Island, Canada, down to northern California, and is poised for its next large earthquake. Towards the top of that list was the 600-mile Cascadia subduction zone. And they can provide a pathway for the rupture to go up, instead of going left,” he explained.įrom there, they used these findings to make tsunami predictions about dozens of other active subduction zones around the “ring of fire”, a nearly 25,000-mile path where most of the world’s earthquakes occur. And so, in an outer wedge you have all of these books, and all of these faults in between.
Mountain range map pnw canada cascadea full#
“Imagine a bookshelf full of books, and you take the books and you tilt them all 45 degrees … The interface between any book is a fault. The wider it is, Barbot explained, the more faults there are, the more chances there are to move the seafloor and thus the more extreme the tsunami may be. They found a correlative relationship between the maximum tsunami height and the outer wedge. These rare events involve less powerful earthquakes (the authors looked at those measuring 7.1- to 8.2-magnitude) that produce huge tsunamis and have long puzzled scientists. And that’s the case in the Pacific north-west.”įor about two years, he and co-author Qiang Qiu, of the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, studied 11 “tsunami earthquakes” that have taken place across the world over the past 200 years.
“There are places where tiny, so great news,” said Barbot, an associate professor in earth science at the University of Southern California. The connection adds a new element to consider when making tsunami predictions, one that the authors suggest could mean heightened worst-case scenario predictions for some faults, including Cascadia.
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