Cascadia Subduction Zone, one of Earth's top hazards, comes into sharper focus
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Off the coasts of southern British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and northern California lies a 600 mile-long strip where the Pacific Ocean floor is slowly diving eastward under North America. This area, called the Cascadia Subduction Zone, hosts a megathrust fault, a place where tectonic plates move against each other in a highly dangerous way.
The plates can periodically lock up and build stress over wide areas―eventually to be released when they finally lurch against each other. The result: the world's greatest earthquakes, shaking both seabed and land, and generating tsunamis 100 feet high or more.
Such a fault off Japan caused the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Similar zones exist off Alaska, Chile and New Zealand, among other places. At Cascadia, big quakes are believed to come roughly every 500 years, give or take a couple hundred. The last occurred in 1700.
