Analog Science Fiction and Fact - June 2013

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A few years ago, I joined some friends for an event called the Hood to Coast Relay—which, as the name implies, is a relay race running all the way from Oregon’s Mount Hood to the sea (about two hundred miles). That year I didn’t run, but instead served as a volunteer, directing traffic somewhere in the recesses of the Oregon Coast Ranges. Afterward, I joined my friends at the beach for sunset, celebration, and a weekend on the coast. Since I’d not run the race, I went for a jog. About two miles into it, I got to thinking about tsunamis. That might sound strange, but those 18 Science Fact Waves of the Future: Where Will the Next Tsunami Strike? Richard A. Lovett who’ve read my prior articles know I’ve often written about seismology, earthquakes, and tectonics. 1 Not far offshore from the Oregon Coast is one of the world’s largest subduction zones—a place where tectonic plates crush together, with one diving beneath another, sometimes in giant lurches. These can produce earthquakes of magnitude 9.0 or greater . . . and undersea earthquakes of that size mean tsunamis. What, I wondered, would I do, if the ground heaved? I knew a tsunami wouldn’t strike until twenty or thirty minutes after a quake ended. That was enough time for me to run three or 1 In fact, my guest Alternate View column in November 2012, “Traditional Mousetraps” was about a different aspect of the global tsunami problem.
four miles . . . assuming bridges were intact and I didn’t have to swim sloughs. Assuming there weren’t power lines down all over the place. Assuming the hill I ran for didn’t turn out to be an impenetrable blackberry thicket. The beach I was running along was three miles long, which meant the middle of it was a mile and a half from high ground. Suddenly, I felt dangerously exposed. The last decade has done much to bring the threat of tsunamis to worldwide attention. The best-known disasters were the ones in Sumatra (230,000 dead on December 26, 2004) and Japan (20,000 dead on March 11, 2011). But those aren’t the only killer waves. The 2010 Chilean earthquake generated eightfoot waves that killed two hundred people. 2 And an earthquake near Samoa on September 29, 2009 washed the islands with 15-foot waves, killing at least 129. 3 Even the Haiti earthquake of 2010 generated a small but deadly tsunami. 4 All of which leads to a simple question: where will the next deadly wave hit? The short answer is that until earthquake prediction becomes a true science, nobody knows. But some regions are at greater risk (and more poorly prepared) than others. The Oregon Coast where I was jogging is one of these. The fault that threatens it is the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which stretches offshore from Northern California to Canada. JUNE 2013 Every few hundred years, geologists believe, this fault unleashes a mega-quake comparable to the one that devastated Japan. The most recent was in 1700 (dated by tree-ring studies of trees it killed). 5 Nobody knows whether that means the fault is about ready to slip again, or if it will be quiescent for several more centuries. Unfortunately, if it happens now, American coastal residents won’t react as well as the Japanese. “The Japanese are culturally attuned to be aware of earthquakes and tsunamis,” says Patrick Corcoran, a disaster specialist at Oregon State University. “We are not.” How many people are in the danger zone is difficult to estimate. Corcoran puts the figure at roughly a hundred thousand, but some of the coastal towns, he notes, can see their populations swell by a factor of ten during peak tourist weekends. “It’s musical chairs,” he said. “When the earthquake happens, whoever is going to be there is going to be there.” In Japan, 90% of the people in the areas hit by the tsunami escaped. In Oregon, Corcoran fears, it might be the reverse: the 90% might well be the victims. 6 Ring of Fire . . . and Water Cascadia is part of the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” where volcanoes (and subduction zones) rim the planet’s most tectonically active zone. Seven of the ten largest earthquakes in recorded history 7 have occurred here—sixteen of the 2 “When Will We Learn,” Newsweek, March 13, 2011, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/ 2011/03/13/when-will-we-learn.html. 3 Ibid. 4 Of the 200,000 who died in that earthquake, only three are known to have been killed by the wave, but there might have been others who survived the collapse of their houses only to drown. See Richard A. Lovett, “Haiti Earthquake Produced Deadly Tsunami,” Nature News (online) 25 February 2010. 5 It also spawned legends among coastal tribes, and produced a tsunami described by Japanese historians. See Richard A. Lovett, “From Atlantis to Canoe-Eating Trees: Geomythology Comes of Age,” Analog, September 2009. 6 Northern California might fare slightly better if people remember 2011, when four people (three of whom survived) were washed out to sea by 8-foot waves from the Japan earthquake. See “Tsunami: Much of Crescent City harbor destroyed; 4 people swept into sea, 1 feared dead,” Los Angeles Times, March 11, 2011, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/03/crescent-city-harbor-destroyed-people-swept-into-sea.html. But history isn’t on the side of memory. The person who died was reportedly photographing the waves — despite the fact that well within living memory, Crescent City had seen 11 fatalities from a tsunami generated by Alaska’s 1964 “Good Friday” earthquake (magnitude 9.2). 7 “Largest Earthquakes in the World since 1900,” U.S. Geological Survey, http://earthquake.usgs.gov/ earthquakes/world/10_largest_world.php. WAVES OF THE FUTURE 19
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Analog Science Fiction and Fact - June 2013

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