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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Rock Doc: Slow-moving quakes may just delay the pain

E. Kirsten Peters

One of the most breathtaking geologic events is a major earthquake. In just a few moments, shaking of the earth can result in billions of dollars of damage and thousands of lives lost.

Many earthquakes are related to the movement of tectonic plates, the large chunks of the Earth’s outer surface that move with respect to each other. Plates are “born” in places like Iceland, where magma comes up from below and creates oceanic plate material. Plates “die” where one plate dives beneath another and ultimately is pulled and pushed down so deeply into the Earth it melts away. Plates vary a bit in how fast they move, but about an inch or two a year is not uncommon.

One example of where the rubber meets the road regarding tectonic movement is in the Pacific Northwest. The Cascadia subduction zone is the area where the Juan de Fuca plate is diving under the North American plate. The movement generates major earthquakes from time to time. The most recent mega-quake occurred in 1700. Geologists think the region is about due for another similar event.

Recently I was reading in Science News about new information regarding earthquakes and plate movement. In the Cascadia region something called “slow slip” happens about every 15 months. Slow slip occurs when the rocks on either side of a major fault move about the same amount as in a major earthquake, but they do so over weeks to months rather than almost instantaneously.

The evidence for slow slip was documented first for Cascadia in the bedrock of Vancouver Island, B.C. Now that geologists know what to look for, slow slip events have been identified the world around. In Japan, some slow slip events have been documented that occur about every three to five years and last a few months, while others occur more frequently.

Often slow slip is too slow to create seismic waves. But sometimes the rock on either side of the fault may move quickly enough to generate seismic waves that are just large enough to be above background noise. In that case, the slow slip generates what scientists call tremor.

A confusing point is that sometimes tremor occurs before or after the movement of the slow slip. Sometimes slow slip occurs with no tremor at all. The reasons for these facts are not currently understood.

The longest period of slow slip yet detected anywhere started last August under Vancouver Island. It began as tremors there, then moved south. It crossed the international border, moving to and then beyond the Seattle region. Altogether, the event lasted 42 days.

At first it might seem that slow slip relieves stress on faults and could help us avoid major quakes. But some geologists think slow slip events transfer stress to areas that then are more likely to rupture when a mega-quake occurs in a region.

So even when it comes to slow-motion earth movement, we’ve got to hang on to our hats.

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.