Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior.
The Cascadia subduction zone has the potential to rock the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia with devastating earthquakes. Now, a closer-than-ever look at the megafualt's structure reveals it is segmented into multiple major regions.
In many subduction zones, where oceanic crust grinds underneath lighter continental crust, small and medium-size earthquakes are common. These mini-quakes give researchers information about what the hidden portions of tectonic plates look like and where various faults are located. Today's instruments are much more sophisticated, Carbotte said, but no one had done a repeat study of the region. So in 2021, the researchers behind the new study gathered new seismic data along the fault.
The data revealed that as the oceanic crust is subducting, or diving down, it is also breaking up."Now that we have actual information spanning the whole region we know that the fault surface is much more complex in its geometry than the picture we had from that very old data," Carbotte said. The Cascadia subduction zone last generated a major earthquake in 1700. There are no written records of the event from that time, but drowned trees and a mystery tsunami recorded in Japan reveal that on Jan. 26 of that year, a magnitude 8.7 to 9.2 quake shook the region. Researchers don't know if the 1700 quake was caused by the entire fault rupturing or just one segment.
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