Nature, the earth, and all of its events and cycles have a way of making us humans look pretty tiny. One needs only to look at a mountain range to realize that; when we go to the post office at our little local community center, there is a spot on the highway where we crest a low hill and, on a clear day, see the massive Alaska Range dominating the skyline to the north, and those mountains are 150 miles away.
Natural events, like tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes, can make human efforts look pretty tiny. This blue and white pearl we live on operates on scales and time spans we have a hard time wrapping our brains around, and on Friday, a 7.0 earthquake in California reminded us of that.
Here's the kicker: There is a hidden danger on the West Coast that could be much greater than Friday's temblor.
The epicenter of Thursday’s 7.0 magnitude shaker occurred in what’s known as California’s “earthquake country” because it’s where three tectonic plates meet. The temblor was the most powerful to rattle the state since a 7.1-magnitude quake hit Ridgecrest in 2019.
Its intensity shocked Starkey and many of the 5.3 million other people along nearly 500 miles (805 kilometers) of the California and Oregon coasts who were under the tsunami warning for about an hour. It was lifted after no major waves arrived.
San Andreas, of course, is the most famous source of earthquakes on the West Coast. But it's not the biggest. It's not even close to the biggest. The Cascadia Subduction Zone is the real danger. Where San Andreas and faults of that nature involve two crust plates sliding past each other, Cascadia has one plate colliding with another and being pushed down into the mantle. This has the potential to create earthquakes and tsunamis of incredible proportions.
Off the southern coasts of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and northern California, a 600-mile-long strip exists where the Pacific Ocean floor gradually subducts eastward beneath North America.
This area, called the Cascadia Subduction Zone, hosts a megathrust fault, a place where tectonic plates move against each other in a highly dangerous way. The plates can periodically lock up and build stress over wide areas―eventually to be released when they finally lurch against each other.
The result: the world’s greatest earthquakes, shaking both seabed and land, and generating tsunamis 100 feet high or more. Such a fault off Japan caused the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Similar zones exist off Alaska, Chile, and New Zealand, among other places. At Cascadia, big quakes are believed to come roughly every 500 years, give or take a couple hundred. The last occurred in 1700.
We have no record here of that 1700 event, of course, as only natives lived on the West Coast at that time, and none of them kept written records. But there are oral accounts that have been passed down, and there are also Japanese records of the event, as well as geological clues that the quake and the resulting tsunami left behind.
Another major event in the Cascadia Subduction Zone would be - will be disastrous.
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Powerful Earthquake, Tsunami Warnings Hit Japan as People Are Ordered to Evacuate Some Areas
An event that produces a tsunami that causes damage in Japan would have implications for all of our West Coast. Consider it; a 100-foot high wave crashing into Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and even Los Angeles. Depending on the scale of the event, there could be damage as far away as Anchorage, even Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Vladivostok (Russia).
We're talking millions dead, and billions, maybe trillions of dollars in property damage. This is an event that would take generations to fully recover from.
Granted, there's little reason to spend a lot of brain run-time worrying over this, as there's nothing we can do to prevent it. Scare-mongering is not my intent. But it's prudent to be aware of the various threats and cautions that surround us and to plan accordingly, although it would seem the only thing one could do in this case is to have a handy bug-out bag and a planned route to higher ground if one lives in the danger area.
Climate scolds like to wag their fingers at us over our carbon footprints, and there's a stunning irony in the frequency with which these people do so from the comfortable confines of a private Gulfstream jet. But one good volcano can put human efforts to shame when it comes to altering the atmosphere and global climate, and one good 9.5 earthquake could destroy much of our West Coast. It's interesting, isn't it, how such things make humanity and all of our efforts look insignificant indeed.
The earth moves at its own pace and has its own cycles and events. The best we can do is to be aware of what may be coming and try to plan accordingly.
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