Disaster Planning – Pacific Coast Tsunami Preparations
The Cascadia subduction zone is a 600-mile-long offshore earthquake fault that runs from northern California to southern British Columbia. And that fault has a serious tale to tell. Geologists have found sand deposits up and down the Pacific coast along this zone, the result of a tsunami a little over 300 years ago.
Three hundred years is a long time and that bit of trivia in and of itself may not seem threatening, but pair it with what scientists now know about earthquake patterns, and the Pacific Northwest Coasters should be trembling in fear – or at least preparing for an impending disaster in the very near future.
“I think all subduction zones are guilty until proven otherwise,” Dr. Kerry Sieh told National Geographic in their February 2012 issue. Sieh, director of the Earth Observatory at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, is one of the world’s leading paleoseismologist. He spends his days obsessing over geologic records for evidence of ancient earthquakes and tsunamis, and identifies what he calls, “supercycles” or clusters of big earthquakes that occur at regular and predictable intervals. (more…)