Posted on 07/03/2021 12:33:51 PM PDT by BenLurkin
A team of scientists is reportedly working to obtain the sharpest pictures ever taken of the Cascadia subduction zone – a fault line that runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest.
The subduction zone, which has been the site of some of North America's largest earthquakes and the Earth's past "megathrust" earthquakes, has been strangely quiet, with almost no seismic activity detected.
To investigate Cascadia's Oregon and British Columbia portion and the reason for this lull, Columbia University led a team of researchers – including students – from the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, University of Washington, Oregon State University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which has boarded Columbia's R/V Marcus G. Langseth for the weeks-long expedition funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Science technicians are also present to help operate the seismic equipment as well as marine mammal observers and the Langseth's officers and crew.
Langseth will use ultrasound technology, emitting sound pulses from a sound source towed behind the ship to construct a detailed image of the subsurface.
Additionally, the team will reportedly use hydrophone microphones and hundreds of other receivers on the ocean floor and land to record echoes and reflections from the fault.
Cascadia's silence has been assumed to mean the fault is "entirely locked," signaling the potential for a Cascadia megaquake.
Science Mag said that movement captured by GPS stations has been reassuring, suggesting that part of the fault is "creeping" and releasing stress and that there's evidence that many large quakes did not rupture the whole fault, but the question of when the next "big one" will strike remains.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
All they have to do is ask Dutchinese, he’ll tell them the day and the hour of the next big one in plenty of time to get ready.
“The Really Big One”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one
“10,000 years of Cascadia earthquakes”
https://projects.oregonlive.com/maps/earthquakes/timeline
Waiting for the Big One - Peter Gabriel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvBa-aC1hvw
Good articles.
An older article stated everything west of I5 freeway would be destroyed or rendered useless due to infrastructure damage. A view of the USGS earthquake website shows hundreds of earthquakes over the past month or more in Washington, California and Idaho. But Oregon has very few. Locked and loaded.
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