Cascadia fault zone stuck, ‘locked’, big one on way, says scientists

Fault zone ready to break loose, massive earthquake, tsunami on way?

PACIFIC NORTHWEST (INTELLIHUB.COM) — Seismic listening posts in the region have gone silent, raising alarm bells for scientists who say the next megaquake and tsunami may be slowly building pressure for a massive release as the fault is currently not slipping.

Cascadia Fault Zone (USGS)

Geologists have also found evidence in “marshes” and other areas which show that these 9.0 and higher megaquakes likely take place every 400-600 years.

“The last full rip of the Cascadia Subduction Zone happened in January 1700. The exact date and destructive power was determined from buried forests along the Pacific Northwest coast and an “orphan tsunami” that washed ashore in Japan.”, KPLU.org reports.

Doug Toomey, a geophysics professor at the University of Oregon, also told KPLU that it’s ‘imperative’ residents of the Pacific Northwest prepare and be ready for the next big one, which may come sooner than later.

The area is currently being monitored by at least two teams.

The Japanese-Canadian team, which published their research in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, wrote: ‘The lack of interplate seismicity is interpreted to reflect complete healing and locking of the megathrust over three centuries after the previous great earthquake,’ wrote Koichiro Obana and his co-authors in the BSSA paper., the Daily Mail reports.