Earthquakes Continue Along U.S. West Coast, 5.4 Hits Off Oregon Coast

M5.4 earthquake hits the Cascadia Subduction Zone off Oregon coast

A shallow M5.4 earthquake hit off Oregon coast on July 17, 2019 at a depth of 10 km (6.2 miles), 227km W of Bandon, Oregon.

That is right on the Cascadia Subduction Zone!

Although pretty far from the coast, 9 reports of feeling tremors have been uploaded to the USGS website.

The San Andreas Fault is so famous it’s the star of a movie. But the San Andreas fault’s nearest neighbor, the far more dangerous Cascadia subduction zone has remained obscure, ignored, and denied.

Not only is the next Cascadia earthquake overdue, but the buildings and infrastructures of the cities it will hit along the coastline — including Portland and Seattle — are nowhere near ready for it. 

Also known as “the mega-thrust zone,” the Cascadia subduction zone is a 700-mile fault line below the floor of the Pacific Ocean, stretching from Cape Mendocino, Calif., to Vancouver Island, Canada.

The fault line parallels the Cascade Range of volcanic mountains that run about 100 miles inland from the shoreline, starting in Northern California and ending in British Columbia, Canada.

In the Cascadia subduction zone, one tectonic plate — the 90,000-sq.-mile Juan de Fuca — is sliding underneath North America, and the volcanic mountains of the Cascade Range mark the line where the Juan de Fuca plate is heating up and melting everything above it.

This is causing the stuck edge of North America — namely, the Pacific Northwest region — to bulge at a rate of three to four millimeters annually, and to compress eastward at 30 millimeters to 40 millimeters as well.

This Isn't Normal: 20 Large Quakes Have Hit California Within The Last 24 Hours

It has been more than 10 days since southern California was hit by the two largest earthquakes that the state has experienced in decades, and yet the shaking refuses to stop. 

In fact, now northern California is joining the party.  On Tuesday, San Francisco residents were greatly alarmed when a magnitude 4.3 earthquake rattled buildings all over the region.  Thankfully not a lot of damage was done, but it has been a very long time since California has been hit by so many sizable earthquakes over such an extended period of time.  According to the USGS, there have been 20 earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or greater in the state of California within the last 24 hours.  Of course most of the “experts” are assuring us that all of this seismic activity will soon settle down, but what if they are wrong?

The magnitude 4.3 earthquake that just hit the San Francisco Bay area definitely surprised a lot of the “experts”.  According to one local resident, it felt “as if something had slammed against the side of our house”…

A magnitude 4.3 earthquake rattled the San Francisco Bay Area Tuesday afternoon, and residents around the region widely reported feeling light shaking.

The quake struck at 1:11 p.m. with a depth of 7.46 miles and an epicenter in the East Bay, about 7.5 miles east of Blackhawk and 17 miles southeast of Concord, according to the United States Geological Survey.

“I felt it,” says Aimee Grove who lives in the East Bay. “But it just felt like a single jolt, as if something had slammed against the side of our house.”

And that quake was followed just four minutes later by an even larger earthquake in southern California…

Four minutes later, a magnitude 4.5 quake hit near Ridgecrest, which, earlier this month, was rattled by a pair of massive temblors, including the most powerful shaker ( a magnitude 7.1) to strike California in 20 years.

And, then, at 1:24 p.m., the Bay Area felt another rumble, this time a magnitude 3.2, again centered near Blackhawk, an unincorporated community east of Oakland. It was originally reported as a magnitude 3.5.

The entire west coast of the United States sits along the Ring of Fire, and we have seen very unusual seismic activity all along the Ring of Fire in recent weeks.  A recent article posted by the Big Wobble cited a few of the examples that we have seen over the past few days…

A magnitude 6.4 (reduced to a 6.2) – 25km N of Kandrian, Papua New Guinea is the 5th major quake to strike the planet in the last 4 days.

The quake struck 26 km (14 miles) north of Kandrian, in New Britain, at a depth of 33 km.

There were no immediate reports of damage.

Nearby Indonesia’s Moluccas islands were hit by scores of aftershocks on Monday after a magnitude 7.3 earthquake killed at least two people, prompting hundreds of people to flee their homes on Sunday.