Seattle could escape catastrophic damage if the conditions are right. "The average duration of strong shaking in Seattle is about 100 seconds, about four times as long as from the 2001 Nisqually earthquake," the magnitude 6.8 earthquake that rattled the Seattle region, study collaborator Art Frankel, a USGS seismologist and affiliate faculty member at the University of Washington, said in a statement. The Jell-O-like Seattle basin could have a long-lasting earthquake, the researchers found. You can imagine if you shake a plate that has some Jell-O on it, the Jell-O will shake much more because it's so weak." "People like to describe it as sitting on top of a bowl of Jell-O. "That kind of weak material tends to make the ground shake more," Wirth said. There was also consistently strong shaking in areas on top of sedimentary basins, which are basins filled with layers of different sediments, including the Seattle basin. Over the course of the 50 simulations, "we always saw the strongest shaking along the coast, since they are closest to the offshore fault," Wirth told Live Science. (There are other active faults in the Pacific Northwest, but the CSZ is capable of triggering the strongest earthquakes, according to the Washington State Department of Natural Resources.) At the fault line, the offshore Juan de Fuca plate is moving toward, and eventually under, the plate holding the continent of North America. The Pacific Northwest is in earthquake country largely because of the Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ), a 620-mile-long (1,000 kilometers) fault stretching from northern Vancouver Island, Canada, to Cape Mendocino, California, according to the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.
#PACIFIC NORTHWEST EARTHQUAKE FULL#
"In running 50, we were trying to show the full range of possibilities by varying all these parameters." "People have done simulations like this in the past, but they only did one or two," said study lead researcher Erin Wirth, who did the project while a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington.
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