Sentences with phrase «subduction fault»

As longtime readers here know, Oregon will inevitably be struck by a potent earthquake generated along the Cascadia subduction fault offshore.

The subducting plates do not slip continuously; instead, the plates are stuck together along the upper portion of the subduction fault, which is referred to as «locked zone.»

«With a subduction fault, you get a much larger locked area, so the quakes can be much bigger,» says geophysics professor Mark Zoback of Stanford University.

«The Boxing Day earthquake of 2004 and the Japan Tohoku - oki earthquake in 2011 both ruptured to much shallower depths than expected, producing very large earthquakes and tsunami, and prompting a re-evaluation of earthquake slip potential and of the properties of shallow subduction faults,» Professor McNeill continued.

[UPDATE: Here's a video explaining how subduction faults generate such potent earthquakes and tsunamis, created by Steven Ward, a geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz:]

Not exact matches

An apocalyptically - worded story in the latest issue of the New Yorker detailed the devastation that might result from a high - magnitude earthquake along the Cascadia subduction zone, a fault line that runs from Cape Mendocino, Calif., to Vancouver Island, Canada.

However, the seismic potential of crustal faults within the forearc of the northern Cascadia subduction zone in British Columbia has remained elusive.

Combining the 19th - century records of such effects with modern earthquake models helped Beauducel and Feuillet pin down both the quake's magnitude and the location of the fault rupture, the spot where the subduction zone tore apart.

Now scientists are calling attention to a dangerous area on the opposite side of the Ring of Fire, the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a fault that runs parallel to the Pacific coast of North America, from northern California to Vancouver Island.

«This ocean drilling expedition will for the first time drill scientific boreholes within the sediments entering this subduction zone, including the layer of sediment that eventually develops into the earthquake - generating fault,» Professor Henstock explained.

Most earthquakes are said to occur at subduction zones or along faults in tectonic plates.

The mechanics of great subduction earthquakes are influenced by the frictional properties, structure, and composition of the plate - boundary fault.

«Along with evidence of frictional obstruction to subduction,» Tsuji says, «the fault structure appears to have also impacted earthquake location and behavior.

This subduction has created a collision zone with the potential to generate huge earthquakes and accompanying tsunamis, which happen when faulted rock abruptly shoves the ocean out of its way.

The strain that is released in a subduction zone earthquake is thought to build up in the deep portion of the fault where the two plates are «locked.»

The findings could apply to other faults with similarly thick sediment, such as the Cascadia Subduction Zone in the Pacific Northwest, suggests study coauthor Andre Hüpers, a geophysicist at the University of Bremen in Germany.

«This was an event the thrust interface of the plate boundary system, confirming that there is a subduction system in the Haida Gwaii area,» said Honn Kao, seismologist with the Geological Survey of Canada, who, along with his colleagues, examined the source parameters — causative faults, rupture processes and depths — of the mainshock and sequence of strong aftershocks.

A close study of the Haida Gwaii mainshock by Kao et al. revealed the Pacific plate slid at a low angle below the North American plate on a previously suspected thrust fault, confirming the presence of subduction activity in the area.

The Sea of Okhotsk earthquake may have involved re-rupture of a fault in the plate produced when the oceanic plate bent down into the Kuril - Kamchatka subduction zone as it began to sink.

The surface where they slip is called the fault, and the system of faults comprises a subduction zone.

This predictability most likely stems from the fact that water flowing from below subduction zones may exert significant control over when and where these faults slip silently.

We hope that this new finding will promote the mapping and discovery of such faults along active subduction margins and will also help explain the variability in the recurrence of great - earthquakes encountered on many subductions globally.»

One of the primary questions they hope to answer is whether the pressures and temperatures experienced at depth here lead to the unusual properties of this subduction zone fault, and if that in turn leads to larger and more powerful earthquakes.

Further, it alerts scientists that earthquake clustering may not only characterise shallow faulting and smaller - sized earthquakes with magnitudes lower than M7 but it is a property of large subduction earthquakes.

U.S. Geological Survey scientist Jeanne Hardebeck calculated the frictional strength of subduction zone faults worldwide, and the stresses they are under.

Subduction zone megathrust faults produce most of the world's largest earthquakes.

Together with prior evidence showing that some subduction zone faults are «weak,» this implies that all of the faults are «weak,» and that subduction zones are «low - stress» environments.

The stresses are the forces acting on the subduction zone fault system, and are the forces that drive the earthquakes.

The study of new linkages between the two types of seismic activity, published in Nature Geoscience on Sept. 11, may help promote better understanding of earthquake hazard posed by subduction zones, a type of fault responsible for some of the world's most powerful earthquakes.

The Arabian and Eurasian tectonic plates collide offshore of Pakistan, forming a subduction zone, but today's earthquake was onshore and mostly strike - slip — each side of the fault moved horizontally.

The challenge, said Kohler, was to develop a standard set of algorithms that could account for the different tectonic environments in each region, including the offshore subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest and the mostly on - shore faults in California.

A plate can bump up against another plate at a fault zone, or dive beneath one at a subduction zone.

The researchers also found that the fault zone was less than 5 metres thick, tens of times thinner than at other subduction zones, facilitating the slip (Science, doi.org/qdn).

Megathrusts, the huge continuous faults found in subduction zones, are responsible for Earth's largest earthquakes.

The Cascadia subduction zone lies offshore from northern California to southwestern British Columbia, where two tectonic plates — the North America plate and the Juan de Fuca plate — come together to form an 800 - mile long earthquake fault.

CONTENT CONTAINED IN THIS PACKAGE INCLUDES: - LAYERS OF THE EARTH - THE SOLAR SYSTEM - WEATHERING - EROSION - DEPOSITION - THE EARTH»S ATMOSPHERIC LAYERS - COMPOSITE VOLCANOES - SHIELD VOLCANOES - CINDER CONES - CALDERAS - RENEWABLE ENERGY - PLATE BOUNDARY - SUBDUCTION - DIVERGENT - COLLISION - TRANSORM - LANDFORMS - NORMAL FAULT - REVERSE FAULT - STRIKE - SLIP FAULT - PHASES OF THE MOON - COMMON AIR POLLUTANTS - TYPES OF CLOUDS - GEOLOGIC TIME SCALE - THE WATER CYCLE - MINERAL FORMATION - THE ROCK CYCLE - MOHS HARDNESS SCALE - TYPES OF SOIL - TYPES OF STRESS

Given Dot Earth's long focus on the risk to schools in Oregon from the Cascadia Subduction Zone and other earthquake faults, I thought you would like to know we are making progress.

To improve seismic hazard assessment along subduction zones as well as other dangerous faults such as continental transforms, we need a set of open software tools to explore alternatives, we need a trans - national dialogue to discuss and vet our different ideas and approaches, and we need to conduct prospective tests of global models that are based on these various national strategies.

It is a very long sloping subduction zone fault separating the Juan de Fuca and North America plates.