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This should have West Coasters shaking in their shoes.
Hundreds of miles of coastline in the Pacific Northwest could go straight into the drink if another major earthquake strikes the region, an alarming new study warned.
A 600-mile-long earthquake hotspot off the Pacific Coast could be due for another monster rumble — and if one happens, shorelines from northern California to Vancouver, Canada, could suddenly sink 6 feet or more.
Towns and cities for hundreds of miles would find themselves in a brand new floodplain, at risk of catastrophic floods and tsunamis at any moment, according to the study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The aforementioned earthquake minefield is called the Cascadia Subduction Zone, an undersea fault line roughly 100 miles off the coast of North America.
A big quake there could send massive tsunamis hurtling toward the shore and change the landscape forever.
It could double the “flooding exposure of residents, structures and roads,” the study warned. Bridges, power lines and other infrastructure would need to be totally rebuilt or else risk instant destruction in a major storm.
The land at risk of flooding would increase by 116 square miles (the equivalent of five Manhattans), the number of people living in floodplains would increase from around 8,000 to 22,000 — and the number of at-risk structures would go from around 13,000 to 36,000, according to the study.
Those grim numbers are more than a hypothetical guess: The study’s authors looked at data from another monster earthquake that wiped out a section of Canadian coastline in 1700.
Oral histories by the Huu-ay-aht First Nation, in present-day Vancouver Island, tell of shaking that was so intense they thought two cosmic beings — a thunderbird and a whale — must be fighting it out.
Whole forests and villages plunged into the sea, and only one in 600 people living in the area are said to have survived, according to a paper published in Seismological Research Letters.
Modern science has backed up that terrifying tale: Researchers discovered “ghost forests” and fields of native grasses that seem to have been submerged in moments — a kind of geological snapshot of what could happen if the proverbial thunderbird and whale get into another scrap.
Earthquakes are impossible to truly predict, but in the next 50 years, scientists have put the odds of a major quake at 7-12% in the Cascadia Zone, and 37-42% for just the southern section, which includes northern California and Oregon.
By the year 2060, those odds will have roughly doubled, according to the United States Geological Survey.
So if you buy a beach house in the Pacific Northwest, you might also want to get a canoe.
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