re: #20 teleskiguy

I re-read the Pulitzer Prize winning New Yorker article The Really Big One from time to time. Not only is it fantastic writing it’s also one the most frightening gotdam things that has been written in the 21st century. The PNW in a megathrust subduction zone earthquake would be utterly destroyed, the most devastating natural disaster in U.S. history by far. And it could happen, that subduction zone is hundreds of years overdue for a megathrust earthquake. The last one occurred approximately the year 1700, which caused a huge tsunami in Japan that was recorded in Japanese folklore.

1700 Cascadia earthquake

The 1700 Cascadia earthquake occurred along the Cascadia subduction zone on January 26, 1700, with an estimated moment magnitude of 8.7-9.2. The megathrust earthquake involved the Juan de Fuca Plate from mid-Vancouver Island, south along the Pacific Northwest coast as far as northern California. The length of the fault rupture was about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles), with an average slip of 20 meters (66 ft).

The earthquake caused a tsunami which struck the west coast of North America and the coast of Japan. Japanese tsunami records, along with reconstructions of the wave moving across the ocean, put the earthquake at about 9pm on the evening of 26 January 1700.