Wildfires and hurricanes are dominating the disaster spotlight, but the threat of a massive earthquake still simmers beneath the surface in the Pacific Northwest.
The National Science Foundation today announced $15 million in new funding over five years for the creation of the Cascadia Region Earthquake Science Center (CRESCENT). The facility will be based at the University of Oregon and the University of Washington will be a lead partner.
The research will focus on the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a fault stretching more than 620 miles from the northern edge of Vancouver Island, B.C., to Cape Mendocino in Northern California. Along the fault, the tectonic plates beneath the ocean are shoving under or “subducting” beneath the North American continental plate. But the plates don’t slide smoothly and instead build up frictional stress that is released in a quake.
Subduction zone quakes are the largest observed — and based on historical records, the region is due for one.
“The main goal of the center is to bring together the large group of geoscientists working in Cascadia to march together to the beat of a singular drum,” said center director Diego Melgar at the University of Oregon, in a statement.
The new center will be the first in the U.S. focused on subduction quakes.
Sixteen organizations will team up for the effort, which emphasizes collaboration over competition. The researchers will leverage technology including high-performance computing and artificial intelligence to model the sort of “megathrust” quakes the fault could generate.
“This NSF Center will be a game-changer for earthquake research in the Pacific Northwest; it will have direct, real-world public safety consequences for policy and planning,” said Harold Tobin, a professor of Earth and space sciences at the UW and director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, in a statement. Tobin will lead the effort for the UW.
The scientists will study the fault to identify locations of increased strain and work to forecast potential impacts of an earthquake to better help communities prepare for an event.
On Feb. 28, 2001, the Seattle area experienced the 6.8 magnitude Nisqually earthquake, which damaged buildings and roadways.
The Cascadia Subduction Zone could create a 9.0 magnitude quake, which would be 100 times more powerful than the Nisqually quake and could collapse buildings, break power and gas lines, and trigger landslides and a tsunami.
The NSF awarded an additional $6 million for a second center, called the Statewide California Earthquake Center (SCEC).
The funding will also support programs to increase diversity in geosciences.
