The Pacific Northwest sits on top of the Cascadia subduction zone, and experts believe the fault could one day unleash a monstrous earthquake registering as magnitude nine. To get an understanding of just how devastating a magnitude nine quake could be in the middle of the ocean, one just has to look back to March 11, 2011, to the Japanese tsunami.
During that quake when a magnitude nine hit in the Pacific ocean, waved measuring up to 40 metres tall hit parts of Japan. Almost 16,000 people died.
The Cascadia subduction zone is thought to generate a huge quake every 200 to 530 years. The last one arrived in 1700.
When that fateful earthquake hit, the fault slipped by 20 metres and ruptured for 620 miles down the west coast of the US and Canada.
Such was the power of the quake that a tsunami hit the coast of Japan more than 3,000 miles away.
And experts believe it is now just a matter of time before the next disaster strikes.
When it does, the Cascadia subduction zone could unleash an earthquake measuring up to magnitude nine and cause devastating tsunamis.
One expert believes there is more than a tenth of a chance the massive quake could hit within the next half a century.
Erin Wirth, a geophysicist at the University of Washington and the US Geological Survey, told Geekwire: “We say that there’s approximately a 14 percent chance of another approximately magnitude-9 earthquake occurring in the next 50 years.”
What makes a subduction zone more lethal than a regular earthquake fault line is that the former is a region where two plates lie on top of each other.
As a result, subduction zone faults can cause much more damage as one plate crushes the other.
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“The whole Pacific Northwest is very, very fragile. Essentially our cities are turn-of-the-century cities built on a time bomb.
“We could literally have it right now. And we’d be looking around, saying ‘okay, I guess this is it.’
“The more we know about it, the less we like it.”