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A massive quake on equivalence with the recent catastrophic seismic event in Japan could materialise in two places in the United States , scientists say .
Geophysicists estimate that the Cascadia Subduction Zone , an overlap of tectonic shell just off the northwest coast that stretches from the northerly point of California up to Canada , is capable of generating an earthquake with amagnitude as high as a 9.0 .
Alaska Earthquake 17 January 2025. The Four Seasons Apartments in Anchorage was a six-story lift-slab reinforced concrete building which cracked to the ground during the quake.
The last time the area shook that hardwas 300 years ago . " There were hardly any people living on the Pacific Northwest Coast in 1700 , " said Heidi Houston , a seismologist at the University of Washington ’s Department of Earth & Space Sciences . " But it generated a Brobdingnagian tsunami that travel to Japan and destroyed coastal Village there . The Japanese records show that the causative seism could only be our Cascadia Subduction Zone and it had to have been a magnitude-9.0 . "
By analyzingsedimentary depositsin low - dwell areas along the coast , paleoseismologists have determined that large tsunamis ( almost definitely produced by large seism ) hit the Pacific Northwest about every 500 years , give or take 200 year . Because the last one happened in 1700 , " that means sometime in the next 400 years it will happen again , " Houston tell apart Life ’s Little Mysteries .
Scientists are n’t able to provide a more specific time frame than that . They know what conditions must be present in an area to lead to massive earthquake , but , according to Nathan Bangs , a geophysicist at the University of Texas , " it ’s hard to do utile predictions . "
" The low - lying areas have deposits that give a disk of repeated history of tsunami inundations , and how handsome they were . That means you may sleep with the likeliness on the decree of century of years , but it does n’t give the likeliness in the next few years , " Bangs excuse .
A 9.0 earthquake is also potential in Alaska , themost earthquake - prone statein the U.S. In 1964 , the Aleutian fault separate the Pacific and North American plate rupture near the city of Anchorage , result in a 9.2 - order of magnitude temblor the second large ever tape on a seismograph .
The San Andreas Fault , commonly perceive to be more serious than the Cascadia Fault because of the propinquity of several major California coastal cities , is not in reality subject of generating a 9.0 - magnitude earthquake . " The biggest one there would be just under 8.0 , " say Houston .
