Scientist Issues Warning of Major West Coast Earthquake

It's been nearly 12 decades since the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 killed as many as 3,000 people. Now, one scientist is warning that another major West Coast earthquake could be imminent and perhaps even more devastating than that one.

Tina Dura, a geosciences professor at Virginia Tech, was the lead author of a recent study that looked into the risk of major flooding in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California. The study looked into flooding that would be caused from two factors happening together: powerful earthquakes and rising sea levels due to climate change.

Dura and other experts have begun to worry about "the next big event being imminent" in the Cascadia subduction zone, which stretches from Northern California to Washington, given that a major event has not happened in over 300 years.

"We expect something like the Japan 2011 and Sumatra 2004 earthquakes and tsunamis to occur there," Dura told Accuweather.

In an email to Newsweek, Dura clarified that such an earthquake could come "tomorrow or decades from now," but it's "well within the window of possibility."

"But geologically speaking, we're well within the window of possibility. The last event was in 1700, and paleoseismic records show these earthquakes recur roughly every 200 to 800 years," she told Newsweek.

"The National Seismic Hazard model shows that there is a 15% chance of a large (over magnitude 8) earthquake happening sometime in the next 50 years.

"By 2100, there is a 30% chance of a large earthquake happening. To me, those probabilities are high enough that we should be preparing for the effects of such an earthquake."

The Cascadia Subduction Zone is a fault line where the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate is slowly sliding beneath the North American plate.

As Newsweek explains, the boundary between the two tectonic plates is capable of producing megathrust earthquakes that strike with little warning, impacting hundreds of miles of coastline simultaneously, which could trigger widespread land subsidence, powerful tsunamis, and long-lasting infrastructure failures.

Based on the warnings from Dura and other experts, it sounds like this type of earthquake could strike at any time.