Towards the top of that list was the 600-mile Cascadia subduction zone. And they can provide a pathway for the rupture to go up, instead of going left,” he explained.įrom there, they used these findings to make tsunami predictions about dozens of other active subduction zones around the “ring of fire”, a nearly 25,000-mile path where most of the world’s earthquakes occur. And so, in an outer wedge you have all of these books, and all of these faults in between. “Imagine a bookshelf full of books, and you take the books and you tilt them all 45 degrees … The interface between any book is a fault. The wider it is, Barbot explained, the more faults there are, the more chances there are to move the seafloor and thus the more extreme the tsunami may be. They found a correlative relationship between the maximum tsunami height and the outer wedge. These rare events involve less powerful earthquakes (the authors looked at those measuring 7.1- to 8.2-magnitude) that produce huge tsunamis and have long puzzled scientists. And that’s the case in the Pacific north-west.”įor about two years, he and co-author Qiang Qiu, of the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology, studied 11 “tsunami earthquakes” that have taken place across the world over the past 200 years. “There are places where tiny, so great news,” said Barbot, an associate professor in earth science at the University of Southern California. The connection adds a new element to consider when making tsunami predictions, one that the authors suggest could mean heightened worst-case scenario predictions for some faults, including Cascadia.
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