A massive earthquake will one day rattle the Pacific Northwest. Minutes to hours later, a surge of seawater will swallow the land.
Updated: 2 hours agoScientists take a sediment core in July near the mouth of the Coquille River on the Oregon Coast, part of their quest to find buried evidence of tsunamis and earthquakes that struck the region.
The last time this happened was more than 300 years ago. That means to understand the future risk, scientists must reconstruct the past. This summer, a team of tsunami detectives, clad in waders and knee-high muck boots, trudged into soggy marshes at the mouth of Oregon’s Coquille River - on the hunt for buried catastrophes.On a sunny July day, scientists wove their way through waist-high marsh grasses, stepping over driftwood trip hazards and sneaky, ankle-twisting channels.
But near the Pacific Northwest’s particularly fraught fault zone, where the Juan de Fuca plate located just offshore dives beneath the North American continental plate at the rate fingernails grow, geologists trade stories that illustrate the mismatch between human and geologic time scales. across the Pacific Ocean - and written records recorded an “orphan tsunami” that swamped Japan without being preceded by local shaking - allowing scientists to pinpoint the last big Cascadia earthquake to Jan. 26, 1700.
To narrow down which earthquake scenarios are likely, Melgar tells scientists including Dura, “Guys, I need more data!”
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