In the end, the magnitude-9.0 Tohoku earthquake and subsequent
tsunami killed more than eighteen thousand people, devastated northeast Japan,
triggered the meltdown at the Fukushima power plant, and cost an estimated two
hundred and twenty billion dollars
Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault
line known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles
off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino,
California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around
Vancouver Island, Canada. 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.
an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the
magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.
When the next very big earthquake hits, the Northwest edge
of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the
Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet
to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has
gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean,
displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. (Watch what your fingertips do when
you flatten your hand.) The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then
promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will
rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest
coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the
shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be
unrecognisable.
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. When the next full-margin rupture
happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of
North America
FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in
the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be
injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a
million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half
million. “This is one time that I’m hoping all the science is wrong, and it
won’t happen for another thousand years,” Director of FEMA Region X, Kenneth Murphy.
(Culled from KATHRYN SCHULZ report,
newyorker.com)
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