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| Earth quake lines Photo by Andrew Buchanan on Unsplash |
With three decades of experience in the field of disaster response, Steve Slepcevic has assisted clients in preparing and recovering from storms, floods, fires, and earthquakes. Emphasizing proper preparedness, Steve Slepcevic has an extensive knowledge of risks associated with the various types of natural disasters.
One major disaster waiting to occur is in the Pacific Northwest, which is not known for frequent earthquakes but sits on the 600-mile-long Cascadia megathrust fault. Stretching from Northern California to Canada’s Vancouver Island, the fault traverses urban areas such as Portland and Seattle.
The Cascadia subduction zone is one that involves the small oceanic Juan de Fuca tectonic plate being driven underneath the much larger North American plate. Such subduction systems can trigger the largest types of earthquakes, with the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan a prime example.
While the Cascadia is much less active than the San Andreas Fault to the south, when an earthquake does hit it will be enormous. The severity will be due to a phenomenon called plate locking, which occurs when stress builds as two plates are stuck together and cannot move past each other.
Geological records reveal that the last such earthquake along the Cascadia fault in 1700 was a magnitude 9.0 temblor, which represents a strength 30 times greater that of the largest predicted quake involving the San Andreas fault. There is currently a window of from 300 to 500 years within which another major Cascadia earthquake is likely to occur.
Accurately predicting the next Cascadia quake is currently impossible. A massive increase in active monitoring stations offshore and onshore will be needed to get a clearer picture of when the event might occur.
One major disaster waiting to occur is in the Pacific Northwest, which is not known for frequent earthquakes but sits on the 600-mile-long Cascadia megathrust fault. Stretching from Northern California to Canada’s Vancouver Island, the fault traverses urban areas such as Portland and Seattle.
The Cascadia subduction zone is one that involves the small oceanic Juan de Fuca tectonic plate being driven underneath the much larger North American plate. Such subduction systems can trigger the largest types of earthquakes, with the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan a prime example.
While the Cascadia is much less active than the San Andreas Fault to the south, when an earthquake does hit it will be enormous. The severity will be due to a phenomenon called plate locking, which occurs when stress builds as two plates are stuck together and cannot move past each other.
Geological records reveal that the last such earthquake along the Cascadia fault in 1700 was a magnitude 9.0 temblor, which represents a strength 30 times greater that of the largest predicted quake involving the San Andreas fault. There is currently a window of from 300 to 500 years within which another major Cascadia earthquake is likely to occur.
Accurately predicting the next Cascadia quake is currently impossible. A massive increase in active monitoring stations offshore and onshore will be needed to get a clearer picture of when the event might occur.
