![]() The answer to this question lies in the fact that Seattle is a heavily populated urban metropolis that is built in a seismic hazard zone. Why Will “The Really Big One” Cause So Much Damage? Some scientists think that the earthquake could start under the Seattle-Tacoma area rather than out in the Pacific ( Blumenthal, 2009). There is some debate over where exactly the quake will originate. The last time the Cascadia Subduction Zone had a big quake was in 1700. But when the subduction zone ruptures, it’s estimated that it’ll be in the 9.0 range. The Cascadia Subduction Zone can have smaller earthquakes that originate in the crustal faults near Mt. Knowing this, let’s take a look at some of the biggest earthquakes in history: A big earthquake is considered in the 7.0 area while a massive one is 8.0+ magnitude. A magnitude 3 earthquake is one hundred times stronger than a magnitude 1 earthquake.Ī sizable earthquake is generally one that is 6.0+ on the Richter Scale. That is, a magnitude 2 earthquake is ten times stronger than a magnitude 1 earthquake. Scientists use the Richter Scale to measure earthquake strength, starting at 1 at the weakest and 10 at the strongest.Įach level of the scale is ten times stronger than the previous. In order to understand this question fully, we have to understand how the strength of earthquakes are measured. The more time goes on and the more populated the area becomes, the more this estimate will rise. This includes estimates for both the damage the earthquake will cause and for the resulting tsunami. Hurricane San Ciriaco (1899): 3,300 fatalitiesĮxperts believe that when the Cascadia Subduction Zone finally ruptures, an estimated 13,000 people will perish.Hurricane Maria (2017): 3,000 fatalities.San Francisco Earthquake (1906): 3,000 fatalities.Hurricane Katrina (2005): 1,800 fatalities.You may think this is an exaggeration, but it’s not. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America.” In this eye-opening article, she states: “In the Pacific Northwest, the area of impact will cover some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. In 2015, The New Yorker Magazine came out with an article titled “The Really Big One” in which author Kathryn Schulz discusses what will happen when a massive earthquake hits the Pacific Northwest. Think of how much energy is being released along a fault the length of 620 miles! The sheer scale of the zone means that when an earthquake occurs, it’s likely to be massive. The Juan de Fuca plate is slipping steadily beneath the northwestern portion of North America. The Cascadia Subduction Zone, for instance, runs for 620 miles along the Pacific Northwest. Why do subduction zones cause the biggest earthquakes? The answer is a simple one: scale. The biggest danger of a subduction zone is that they can cause massive, catastrophic earthquakes. In a subduction zone, one tectonic plate bends and slides beneath another, returning back into Earth’s mantle (the hotter layer beneath the crust). ![]() Occasionally however, at the borders where they meet, it is not. Most of the time their movement is slow, harmless, and all but undetectable. Tectonic plates are those slabs of mantle and crust that, in their epochs-long drift, rearrange the earth’s continents and oceans. The “subduction zone” part refers to a region of the planet where one tectonic plate is sliding underneath (subducting) another. The “Cascadia” part of its name comes from the Cascade Range, a chain of volcanic mountains that follow the same course a hundred or so miles inland. It starts at the northern end of California near Cape Mendocino, runs up the entire length of Oregon and Washington, and continues to at least the middle of Vancouver Island, Canada. The Cascadia subduction zone runs seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest.
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