Cascadia's Fault: The Earthquake and Tsunami That Could Devastate North America
Jerry Thompson
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 1582436436
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Cascadia Subduction Zone is virtually identical to the offshore fault that wrecked Sumatra in 2004. It will generate the same earthquake we saw in Sumatra, at magnitude 9 or higher, sending crippling shockwaves across a far wider area than any California quake. Slamming into Sacramento, Portland, Seattle, Victoria, and Vancouver, it will send tidal waves to the shores of Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, damaging the economies of the Pacific Rim countries and their trading partners for years to come.
In light of recent massive quakes in Haiti, Chile, and Mexico, Cascadia’s Fault not only tells the story of this potentially devastating earthquake and the tsunamis it will spawn, it also warns us about the impending crisis almost unprecedented in modern history.
ruined Titov’s holiday in December 2004. “It was a sad moment for me that I had to spend Christmas day and Christmas night by myself,” Titov said, quietly mocking himself. “I had nothing better to do than go to the office and play with my model,” his computer model of a large tsunami. Late that afternoon he took the scenic route along Sand Point Way to NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory on Seattle’s Lake Washington and fired up the hard drive. As the evening dragged on he tinkered
weeks before Christmas break Tilly had learned about tsunamis in her geography class. Old film footage of a wave that hit Hilo, Hawaii, back in 1946 had evidently left an indelible memory because she immediately recognized the same thing and ran to tell her parents. “I told my mom again and again,” she squealed later in a television interview, “and I was hysterical at this moment, saying, you know, ‘There’s going to be a tsunami! There’s definitely going to be a tsunami!’ You know? Just believe
colleagues headed back toward the beach and sure enough a big swath of California landscape had been hoisted up sharply into new marine terraces. For the next several days the HSU team hiked the shoreline, documented the vertical displacement, and watched while acres and acres of shellfish clinging to rocks that once lay beneath the sea died and rotted. The seismic data showed an almost flat focal plane and the nearly horizontal motion of a thrust fault, agreeing with what Carver could plainly
or hospital be designed to withstand? How large a tsunami should govern evacuation plans on the coast?” asked Atwater in a book he cowrote several years later. Atwater’s colleague David Yamaguchi had come closer than anyone else to nailing a more specific date. He went back to the ghost forest at Copalis River several times in search of wood cores that might contain enough growth rings to reveal what year the trees had died. He put together a database, a pattern of rings collected from
down in Humboldt County,” confirmed Gary Carver. His recollection of events was that Satake zeroed in right away on the dates. “He latched on to that 1700 plus or minus a few years—ten years was the range—that we thought was statistically important.” But what about 1700 stuck out in Satake’s mind? He had a hunch and followed it all the way home. When I met Kenji Satake in a small city on the southeast coast of Japan several years later to interview him, he explained why the date had jumped out