United States Geological Survey

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Promoting Earthquake Readiness

Harvey V. Fineberg | Washington Monthly | July 1, 2016

In Oregon, Washington State and California, an early warning system helps citizens and officials better prepare for and respond to earthquakes. In the early morning hours on August 24, 2014, scientists at UC Berkeley received a “ShakeAlert” – an alarm providing warning of a pending earthquake. Five seconds later, the city of Napa felt a magnitude 6.0 earthquake. That five-second warning was an early success for a broader goal: the creation of an earthquake early warning system that can communicate the size, extent and timing of imminent earthquakes on the West Coast...

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The Really Big One

Kathryn Schulz | The New Yorker | July 20, 2016

An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when. Most people in the United States know just one fault line by name: the San Andreas, which runs nearly the length of California and is perpetually rumored to be on the verge of unleashing “the big one.” That rumor is misleading, no matter what the San Andreas ever does...Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada. The “Cascadia” part of its name comes from the Cascade Range, a chain of volcanic mountains that follow the same course a hundred or so miles inland...

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