FEMA Preparing For Magnitude 9.0 Cascadia Subduction Zone Earthquake, Tsunami

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/31/2016 04:00 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-05-30/fema-preparing-magnitude-90-cascadia-subduction-zone-earthquake-tsunami
Submitted by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,
Starting on June 7th, FEMA will be conducting a large scale drill that has been named “Cascadia Rising” that will simulate the effects of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone and an accompanying west coast tsunami dozens of feet tall. According to the official flyer for the event, more than “50 counties, plus major cities, tribal nations, state and federal agencies, private sector businesses, and non-governmental organizations across three states – Washington, Oregon, and Idaho – will be participating”.  In addition to “Cascadia Rising”, U.S. Northern Command will be holding five other exercises simultaneously.  According to the final draft of the Cascadia Rising drill plan, those five exercises are entitled “Ardent Sentry 2016″, “Vigilant Guard”, “Special Focus Exercise”, “Turbo Challenge” and “Joint Logistics Over-The-Shore”.
The primary scenario that of all of these participants will be focusing on will be one that involves a magnitude 9.0 earthquake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone followed by a giant tsunami that could displace up to a million people from northern California to southern Canada.


We have never seen such a disaster before in all of U.S. history.
Do they know something that the rest of us do not?
It is funny that they are preparing to deal with the effects of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone, because that is precisely the size of earthquake that I warned about in an article back in March.

The San Andreas Fault in southern California gets more headlines, but the Cascadia Subduction Zone is a much larger threat by far.  This fault zone is where the Juan de Fuca plate meets the North American plate, and it stretches approximately 700 miles from northern Vancouver Island all the way down to northern California.
If a magnitude 9.0 earthquake were to strike, the immense shaking and subsequent tsunami would cause damage on a scale that is hard to even imagine right now.  Perhaps this is why FEMA feels such a need to get prepared for this type of disaster, because the experts assure us that it is most definitely coming someday.  The following comes from the official website of the “Cascadia Rising” exercise…

A 9.0 magnitude earthquake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) and the resulting tsunami is the most complex disaster scenario that emergency management and public safety officials in the Pacific Northwest could face. Cascadia Rising is an exercise to address that disaster.

June 7-10, 2016 Emergency Operations and Coordination Centers (EOC/ECCs) at all levels of government and the private sector will activate to conduct a simulated field response operation within their jurisdictions and with neighboring communities, state EOCs, FEMA, and major military commands.

If you don’t think that the scenario that they are studying is realistic, perhaps you should consider the fact that the largest earthquake in the history of the continental United States stuck along the Cascadia Subduction Zone back in 1700.  The following comes from CNN…

In fact, “the Cascadia” already has made history, causing the largest earthquake in the continental United States on January 26, 1700. That’s when the Cascadia unleashed one of the world’s biggest quakes, causing a tsunami so big that it rampaged across the Pacific and damaged coastal villages in Japan.

Yes, we all remember the big Hollywood blockbuster about the San Andreas fault.  But if they wanted to be more realistic, they should have made the movie about the Cascadia Subduction Zone.  According to a professor of geophysics at Oregon State University, the Cascadia Subduction Zone has the potential to create an earthquake “almost 30 times more energetic” than anything the San Andreas Fault can produce…

Everyone knows the Cascadia’s cousin in California: the San Andreas Fault. It gets all the scary glamor, with even a movie this year, “San Andreas,” dramatizing an apocalypse in the western U.S.

Truth is, the San Andreas is a lightweight compared with the Cascadia.

The Cascadia can deliver a quake that’s many times stronger — plus a tsunami.

“Cascadia can make an earthquake almost 30 times more energetic than the San Andreas to start with, and then it generates a tsunami at the same time, which the side-by-side motion of the San Andreas can’t do,” said Chris Goldfinger, a professor of geophysics at Oregon State University.

And the kind of tsunami that would be created by such a massive quake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone would absolutely dwarf the massive tsunami that struck Japan back in 2011.  In fact, an article in the New Yorker quoted the head of the FEMA division that oversees Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska as saying that “everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast”…

If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.

…By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people.

We live at a time when the crust of our planet is becoming increasingly unstable. 
All over the world the Ring of Fire is roaring to life, and the Cascadia Subduction Zone lies directly along the Ring of Fire.  Just last week, I wrote about the alarming earthquake swarms that we have seen directly under Mt. Rainier, Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens, and now we have learned that FEMA is about to hold a major drill that is going to simulate a magnitude 9.0 earthquake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone and an accompanying west coast tsunami dozens of feet in height.
Of course most Americans aren’t concerned about this threat at all.
Most Americans just assume that life will continue to go on normally just as it always has.
But I happen to agree with the experts that are promising us that an absolutely massive earthquake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone will strike someday, and when that happens life in America will be permanently altered.

Research shows Cascadia Subduction Zone reacts to tidal forces; ‘slow slip’ building up pressure on fault

https://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2015/04/29/research-shows-cascadia-subduction-zone-reacts-to-tidal-forces-slow-slip-building-up-pressure-on-fault/ by The Extinction Protocol

April 2015 – SEATTLE — As the death toll rises from Nepal’s magnitude 7.8 earthquake, new research from the University of Washington shows that a similar fault off the Pacific Northwest coast is so weak and slippery in places that minuscule tidal forces produced by the sun and moon are enough to trigger tremors. The quakes involved are so tiny they’re imperceptible to people. But they’re part of a recently discovered process called slow slip that ratchets up pressure on the offshore fault called the Cascadia Subduction Zone — slightly boosting the risk of a megaquake and tsunami. The next slow-slip event is expected to begin sometime this fall or winter. The Cascadia fault and the one responsible for Nepal’s devastation are both boundaries where tectonic plates collide.  In Nepal, the Indian subcontinent is being forced under Central Asia, while in the Northwest, the seafloor is diving — or subducting — under North America. Even though the faults aren’t identical, geologists say the Cascadia analysis could help improve the broader understanding of when and how such plate boundaries rupture, generating some of the world’s most powerful quakes.

For the study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, UW geophysicist Heidi Houston analyzed tens of thousands of faint tremors under Washington’s Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island between 2007 and 2012. The tiny quakes occur when tectonic plates slip slowly past each other 20 miles or more underground. These slow-slip events last for several weeks and can propagate 100 miles or more north and south. The pattern repeats roughly every 12 to 14 months. Each slow-slip event releases as much energy as a magnitude 6.5 quake, but the motion is so slow it’s detectable only on sensitive seismometers and GPS stations, Houston explained. While the slow slip relieves strain deep on the fault, it adds a little pressure to the shallower portion — called the locked zone — that will unleash a quake of up to magnitude 9 the next time it ruptures. “It’s very possible, if not likely, that when we have the next very big earthquake it will happen when one of these slow earthquakes happen,” said University of California, Berkeley, researcher Roland Bürgmann, who wrote a companion piece to Houston’s paper titled Diary of a wimpy fault.

Scientists and self-styled seers alike have long been intrigued by a possible link between earthquakes and gravitational and tidal forces, said UW earth sciences professor Ken Creager, who was not involved in Houston’s study. The idea is that fluctuating tidal forces should raise and lower the strain on faults, causing them to snap. But despite decades of study, the impact on regular quakes has proved negligible. Creager and his colleagues were among the first to show that the story is very different with slow slip. They found a clear link between tremor rates and tide cycles in the complex topography of the Pacific Northwest. During some phases, the minute changes in pressure encourage tremor; during other phases, tremor is inhibited. Houston delved into the data in more detail and found that when a portion of the fault first begins to slip, it’s not very sensitive to tidal effects. But as the tremor continues over several days, the fault weakens and the tidal pull becomes a much more dominant factor. “We think the stress causes the fault to start slipping faster,” Houston said.

As a result, little spots where the plates are stuck together break, generating the tiny quakes called tremor. The best explanation for the deep fault’s sensitivity to such small forces is that it must contain far weaker, more slippery rock than anyone imagined, Houston said. The presence of fluid is also key, allowing rocks to slide at depths where the pressure is so great it would otherwise clamp the fault shut. Overall plate motion during slow-slip events adds up to only a little more than an inch. And even when tidal forces are at their peak, as during king tides, the risk of a damaging quake remains very low, Houston said. But new insights into the frictional properties of the deep fault will help researchers develop better models to explain what’s going on down there and devise better experiments to simulate what might happen during different conditions.

The ultimate concern, of course, is the shallower portion of the fault, where plates can jolt past each other by 60 feet or more in what’s called a megathrust quake. Japan’s 2011 Tohoku quake and tsunami was preceded — and likely triggered by — shallow, slow slip on an offshore fault. There’s some evidence of similar slip before a recent quake off the coast of Chile. There’s no proof yet that slow slip or tremor occur on the fault that caused Nepal’s weekend quake, but it wouldn’t be surprising, Creager said. Houston and other researchers are closely tracking Northwest slow-slip events, looking for potential danger signs like more intense tremor or motion close to the locked zone. “There is a possibility — but no guarantee — that there will be some enhanced tremor or slow slip prior to the (Cascadia) megathrust,” Houston said. Researchers are even discussing whether they should issue warnings if such worrisome signs appear. “Maybe we should tell people: We don’t quite know what this means, but we’re fairly certain the probability of an earthquake is bigger now,” Bürgmann said. But 315 years have passed since the last time the Cascadia fault snapped in 1700. Hundreds of slow-slip episodes — and countless tidal cycles — have played out since then without triggering a seismic cataclysm. –PDN