The fault runs roughly 600 miles off the west coast, from northern California to British Columbia, where several smaller tectonic plates are sliding under the much larger North American Plate. An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The speaker at the lectern was wondering if he should carry on with his talk. Leafless, branchless, barkless, they are reduced to their trunks and worn to a smooth silver-gray, as if they had always carried their own tombstones inside them. “They have no place to go.” On one side lies the ocean; on the other, a wide, roadless bog. In 1964, Chief Louis Nookmis, of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation, in British Columbia, told a story, passed down through seven generations, about the eradication of Vancouver Island’s Pachena Bay people. Almost immediately, though, it became extremely uncool, because Goldfinger and every other seismologist standing outside in Kashiwa knew what was coming. “They can’t make it out from that school,” Dougherty said. It will look like the whole ocean, elevated, overtaking land. Goldfinger plans to present his findings at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union next week. © 2020 Advance Local Media LLC. The Pacific Northwest has no early-warning system. As those movies attest, we excel at imagining future scenarios, including awful ones. At approximately nine o’ clock at night on January 26, 1700, a magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck the Pacific Northwest, causing sudden land subsidence, drowning coastal forests, and, out in the ocean, lifting up a wave half the length of a continent. It took roughly fifteen minutes for the Eastern half of that wave to strike the Northwest coast. That problem is not specific to earthquakes, of course. Read classic New Yorker stories, curated by our archivists and editors. A new study by the University of Oregon has concluded that enormous stress is building up, which could be an indication of a large-scale earthquake event just off the coast. Surface waves are slower, lower-frequency waves that move the ground both up and down and side to side: the shaking, starting in earnest. But, by 1987, Atwater, who had found in soil layers evidence of sudden land subsidence along the Washington coast, suspected that that was backward—that the trees had died quickly when the ground beneath them plummeted. The last person I met with in the Pacific Northwest was Doug Dougherty, the superintendent of schools for Seaside, which lies almost entirely within the tsunami-inundation zone. . Thanks to work done by him and his colleagues, we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. It is wonderful science. Finally, in a 1996 article in Nature, a seismologist named Kenji Satake and three colleagues, drawing on the work of Atwater and Yamaguchi, matched that orphan to its parent—and thereby filled in the blanks in the Cascadia story with uncanny specificity. The question facing geologists in the nineteen-seventies was whether the Cascadia subduction zone had ever broken its eerie silence. Inland, the Cascade volcanoes mark the line where, far below, the Juan de Fuca plate is heating up and melting everything above it. When you try it, your right hand will slide up your left arm, as if you were pushing up your sleeve. How do 320 years compare to other intervals in our past? Its height will vary with the contours of the coast, from twenty feet to more than a hundred feet. Recurrence intervals are averages, and averages are tricky: ten is the average of nine and eleven, but also of eighteen and two. OSSPAC estimates that in the I-5 corridor it will take between one and three months after the earthquake to restore electricity, a month to a year to restore drinking water and sewer service, six months to a year to restore major highways, and eighteen months to restore health-care facilities. “But if you add in San Francisco and the North Coast, it is literally almost a grade B movie scenario that people don’t want to think about that much.”. For a moment, that was pretty cool: a real-time revolution in earthquake science. Nearly all the earthquakes in the region are caused by continental plates getting stuck on oceanic plates—as North America is stuck on Juan de Fuca—and then getting abruptly unstuck. “Cascadia: The Big One,” you can do so for free by clicking here. That timespan is dangerous both because it is too long—long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent’s worst fault line—and because it is not long enough. That time line does not allow for finding a flashlight, tending to an earthquake injury, hesitating amid the ruins of a home, searching for loved ones, or being a Good Samaritan. Since trees do not grow in the winter, he and Atwater concluded that sometime between August of 1699 and May of 1700 an earthquake had caused the land to drop and killed the cedars. They'll spend the next two days taking on various earthquake-related challenges and seeing how well their supplies hold up during OPB's "Living Off Your Quake Kit" drill. The flagpole atop the building he and his colleagues had just vacated was whipping through an arc of forty degrees. Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle. This problem is bidirectional. Note: the data used to find these intervals is the same data used to calculate the '37% chance in 50 years' risk we hear about on the news.… Skip to content Cascadia Subduction Zone You run for your life.”, Sign Up for The Sunday Archive Newsletter. I am actually getting information from scientists that left the United States because there is a gag order on the true seismic nature of what’s going on in the United States. So will half of all highway bridges, fifteen of the seventeen bridges spanning Portland’s two rivers, and two-thirds of railways and airports; also, one-third of all fire stations, half of all police stations, and two-thirds of all hospitals. The situation with Cascadia is dire. A new Slow-Slip Event (SSE), aka Episodic Tremor and Slip (ETS) began in the northern section (Wrangellia Zone) of the Cascadia Subduction Zone on 10/4/2020, according to the PNSN. Eighty miles farther out, ten thousand feet below the surface of the sea, the hand of a geological clock is somewhere in its slow sweep. In a radio special as part of OPB's "Unprepared" series, we explore what water infrastructure can tell us about the survival of coastal communities after what could be the largest natural disaster in American history. Otherwise, we’re going to be hammered. Quayle explains, “While the San Andreas is the most studied fault in the world, it’s like peanuts compared to what’s going to be happening in Cascadia. Goldfinger told me this in his lab at Oregon State, a low prefab building that a passing English major might reasonably mistake for the maintenance department. So, why do we put off preparing for it? Tectonic plates are those slabs of mantle and crust that, in their epochs-long drift, rearrange the earth’s continents and oceans. Cape Coral Web Design Web Based Coding, LLC. The question, is there magma movement beneath the surface? When the 2011 earthquake and tsunami struck Tohoku, Japan, Chris Goldfinger was two hundred miles away, in the city of Kashiwa, at an international meeting on seismology. On Friday night, four Oregon households began a weekend-long test of their disaster readiness. But whatever the ultimate figure—and even though U.S. taxpayers will cover seventy-five to a hundred per cent of the damage, as happens in declared disasters—the economy of the Pacific Northwest will collapse. The continent’s far expanses were so unknown to its white explorers that Thomas Jefferson, who commissioned the journey, thought that the men would come across woolly mammoths. The building itself was base-isolated, a seismic-safety technology in which the body of a structure rests on movable bearings rather than directly on its foundation. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. What would the Stephens family do if they were separated by a major earthquake? Occasionally, at the borders where they meet, it is not. On average, the midpoint of that range was 1701. In the event that you end up without a place to shelter after a major earthquake, a mobile "go-kit" should be part of your scenario planning. In that fourteen-hundred-year history, one incident has long stood out for its strangeness. Together, the sloshing, sliding, and shaking will trigger fires, flooding, pipe failures, dam breaches, and hazardous-material spills. A look at what water infrastructure can tell us about the survival of coastal communities after what could be the largest natural disaster in American history. The 1989 earthquake in Loma Prieta, California, which killed sixty-three people and caused six billion dollars’ worth of damage, lasted about fifteen seconds and had a magnitude of 6.9. Thanks to that work, we now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. Without moving your hands, curl your right knuckles up, so that they point toward the ceiling. China’s Belt and Road Is More Like a Giant Giveaway for the 3rd World. Once scientists had reconstructed the 1700 earthquake, certain previously overlooked accounts also came to seem like clues. It will not look like a Hokusai-style wave, rising up from the surface of the sea and breaking from above. The Cascadia Subduction Zone is a 600-mile fault that runs from northern California up to British Columbia and is about 70-100 miles off the Pacific coast shoreline. Dougherty tried seeking help from Oregon’s congressional delegation but came up empty. Megan asks the kids what they’d do if they were on their way home on the bus when a disaster struck. He thought better of it, and lurched away. Soon after that shaking begins, the electrical grid will fail, likely everywhere west of the Cascades and possibly well beyond. Unlike the Cascadia Subduction Zone, where plates are sliding under one another, the San Andreas Fault is known as a transform fault, the tectonic plates are moving laterally, sliding past each other. Truth in History on Financial Survival (Video) – Corbett, Debt Trap? Earthquakes are common in Japan—that one was the third of the week—and the participants were, after all, at a seismology conference. Related story: 7 emergency kits you can buy now to prepare for an earthquake. Depending on location, they will have between ten and thirty minutes to get out. “And I love doing it. For the San Andreas, one of the most extensively studied and best understood fault lines in the world, that upper limit is roughly an 8.2—a powerful earthquake, but, because the Richter scale is logarithmic, only six per cent as strong as the 2011 event in Japan.
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