The Big One is making headlines again – and inspiring some dark humor.
The Big One, a.k.a. the Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake, is the megathrust earthquake that’s expected to happen in the Pacific Northwest at some point, likely within the next 100 years.
On Tuesday, University of Washington scientists announced a new discovery about the subduction zone: it’s leaking.
The Daily Beast immediately dubbed the leak a “harbinger of doom,” and tweeted out an article featuring a GIF of an ominous-looking vent in the sea floor.
Scientists believe this fault line will likely be the source of the next Big One, an anticipated megathrust earthquake so powerful it’ll wreak death and destruction the likes of which we’ve never seen before from a geological event.
In a segment on Thursday night’s Late Show, Stephen Colbert was very concerned about how this newly discovered “tectonic lube” will affect the Cascadia “megathrust.”
After the announcement of the study’s findings, Twitter was flooded with tweets predicting an imminent disaster on par with an eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano and predictions that Los Angeles would be wiped off the map in the ensuing mega tsunami caused by a global pole shift.
Before you start stocking your bunker, let’s be clear: None of those scenarios are supported by science.
So, how scared should we be of this discovery? Here’s what the UW team published in Phys.org on Tuesday:
“Fluid released from the fault zone is like leaking lubricant,” [study co-author Evan] Solomon said. “That’s bad news for earthquake hazards: Less lubricant means stress can build to create a damaging quake.”
That means, in a nutshell, that this finding indicates that we’re getting closer to an inevitable quake along the fault.
But you can be sure that we’ll be asking these scientists more questions about what they’ve found in the days to come – and what it potentially means for our earthquake risk in the Pacific Northwest.
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