12/03/2024

Tsunami Researchers Hunt for Clues about the Next Big Pacific Northwest Quake

A massive earthquake in the Pacific Northwest will one day result in a tsunami

The warnings of a looming cataclysm are ubiquitous along the Oregon Coast. On blue-and-white signs, a cartoon wave curls out of the sea, capital letters blaring: TSUNAMI HAZARD ZONE. Harbingers of a future disaster are always in the periphery, staked next to highways, on neighborhood streets, between the crab shack and the chowder house.

A massive earthquake will one day rattle the region. Minutes to hours later, a surge of seawater will swallow the land. No one knows when.

In the late 1980s, scientists began to recognize that one of the biggest hazards on the planet lurks just off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. The Cascadia Subduction Zone, where one plate of the Earth's crust dives beneath another, stretches from Northern California to Canada's Vancouver Island, getting stuck and building up stresses. Until the day they release.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Washington Post.