![]() A bridge across the Eel River is jerked off its foundations, taking a busload of farm workers with it. Pavement buckles, cars and trucks veer into ditches and into each other. Lights go out and the telephone system goes down.Ĭornices fall, brick walls crack, plate glass shatters. Power lines rip loose in a shower of blue and yellow sparks, falling to the ground where they writhe like snakes, snapping and biting. Telephone poles whip back and forth as if caught in a hurricane. For a few stunned drivers on the back roads in the predawn gloom, the pulse of energy that tears through the ground looks dimly like a 20-mile wrinkle moving through a carpet of pastures and into thick stands of redwoods. The first jolt of stress coming out of the rocks sends a shock wave hurtling into Northern California and southern Oregon like a thunderbolt. Two slabs of the Earth’s crust begin to slip and shudder and snap apart. On a foggy spring morning just before sunrise, 27 miles northwest of Cape Mendocino, California, a pimple of rock roughly a dozen miles below the ocean floor finally reaches its breaking point. What happened in Japan will probably happen in North America. Decades of geological sleuthing recently established that although it appears quiet, this fault has ripped open again and again, sending vast earthquakes throughout the Pacific Northwest and tsunamis that reach across the Pacific. ![]() This tectonic time bomb is alarmingly similar to Tohoku, capable of generating a megathrust earthquake at or above magnitude 9, and about as close to Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver as the Tohoku fault is to Japan’s coast. ![]() ![]() Now scientists are calling attention to a dangerous area on the opposite side of the Ring of Fire, the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a fault that runs parallel to the Pacific coast of North America, from northern California to Vancouver Island. The Japanese - the most earthquake-prepared, seismically savvy people on the planet - were caught off-guard by the Tohoku quake’s savage power. A magnitude-9 earthquake hit the Tohoku region of northeastern Japan, triggering one of the most destructive tsunamis in a thousand years. ![]()
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