Fossilized tree analysis finds a single massive earthquake may have rocked what is now Seattle around 1,100 years ago rather than several smaller quakes, and that another equally powerful one could hit the city in the future.
The Seattle region may have been hit with a massive, magnitude 7.8 earthquake 1,100 years ago after a series of hidden faults ruptured simultaneously, a new study suggests. That is much more powerful than current warnings suggest is possible from the same fault zones.
But in a new study published Sept. 27 in the journal Science Advances, researchers analyzed the fossilized remains of trees killed by the quakes and found that each fault zone likely ruptured simultaneously, or at least within a very short space of time of one another. If the zones did break apart at the same time, the resulting quake would have been more powerful than any other past simulation has predicted.
This timeframe suggests that the quakes were caused by the same tectonic plate movements, increasing the likelihood that they occurred simultaneously. If they did not, then the researchers suspect that each individual earthquake would have had a magnitude somewhere between 7.3 and 7.5.
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