Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [0]
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
PART 1 - TREMORS AND RIPPLES
CHAPTER 1 - Mexico City: Preview of Coming Events
CHAPTER 2 - Lessons from the Rubble: A Front-Page Story
CHAPTER 3 - The Alaska Megathrust: Cascadia’s Northern Cousin
CHAPTER 4 - Against the Wind of Convention: Plafker, Benioff, and Press
CHAPTER 5 - Cauldron and Crust: The Rehabilitation of Continental Drift
CHAPTER 6 - Nuke on a Fault: Early Clues in Humboldt Bay
CHAPTER 7 - Proving the Doubters Wrong: The Chile Connection
CHAPTER 8 - Mount St. Helens: Cascadia’s Smoking Gun?
PART 2 - SETBACKS AND BREAKTHROUGHS
CHAPTER 9 - Mud Cores and Lasers: The Search for Evidence
CHAPTER 10 - The Whoops Factor: Cascadia’s True Nature Revealed
CHAPTER 11 - Quake Hunters: Finding Cascadia’s Ghost Forest
CHAPTER 12 - Cedars, Peat, and Turbidites: A Tipping Point at Monmouth
CHAPTER 13 - Cascadia’s Segmented Past: Apocalypse or Decades of Terror?
CHAPTER 14 - Digital Water: Catching Waves in a Computer
CHAPTER 15 - Defining the Zone: Hot Rocks and High Water
CHAPTER 16 - Cracks, Missing Rings, and Native Voices: Closing In on a Killer Quake
CHAPTER 17 - The Orphan Tsunami: Final Proof of Cascadia’s Last Rupture
CHAPTER 18 - Episodic Tremor and Slip: Tracking Cascadia with GPS
CHAPTER 19 - Turbidite Timeline: Cascadia’s Long and Violent History
CHAPTER 20 - When’s This Going to Happen? The Problems with Prediction
PART 3 - SHOCKWAVES
CHAPTER 21 - Facing Reality: Cascadia Equals Sumatra
CHAPTER 22 - The Next Wave: Thinking the Unthinkable
CHAPTER 23 - Watching It Happen, Wishing It Wouldn’t
CHAPTER 24 - Cascadia’s Fault: Day of Reckoning
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgements
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
INDEX
Copyright Page
To Bette and Ali, the people at the heart of my universe
CASCADIA SUBDUCTION ZONE
TSUNAMI TRAVEL TIME
RING OF FIRE
FOREWORD
by Simon Winchester
Of the sixteen most disastrous earthquakes to have shocked this planet since 1900, no fewer than fifteen have occurred along the shores of the Pacific Ocean, around the notorious Ring of Fire—a crucial but generally unfamiliar component of which is the subject of this book, the Cascadia Subduction Zone.
All of the earthquakes, and all of the tsunamis that some of these quakes have spawned, have been ferociously destructive. In drawing up a league table one might reasonably have supposed the Sumatran tsunami of December 2004—caused, of course, by a huge submarine earthquake after the fracture of an offshore subduction fault system—to be history’s absolute worst; and insofar as it killed a quarter of a million people, then maybe in terms of statistical lethality it is. But what is now officially called the great Tohoku earthquake of 2011—and what spawned the grim tsunami that hit the northeastern Japanese coast on the afternoon of Friday, March 11—has implications that linger still, and that may well make this event even more deadly, in the long term.
The Japanese quake, originating as it did on the western edge of the Pacific tectonic plate, has revived interest—urgent and alarmed interest, even—in what might happen if the Cascadia fault system, which lies with ominous congruency on the plate’s eastern side, were to rupture too. Most imagine the direst of consequences—consequences that are likely to parallel with some precision just what happened in Japan. The two fault systems are very similar and are tectonically connected to each other. Both lie roughly fifty miles (80 km) offshore from their respective continents; both are subject to vast internal stresses; both, if they fracture, can cause terrible ground-shaking onshore; and both can generate immense tsunamis at sea.
All of the broken bones that resulted in northern Japan, all of those broken lives and those broken homes and broken cities and, most sinister of all, those broken atomic reactors, swiftly prompted much of humankind to remember what in calmer times we prefer to forget: that most stern and chilling of mantras which holds, quite simply,