Road damage from the 2001 Nisqually Earthquake in Washington. Credit: DOGAMI Archives
Portland State University is partnering with several other universities on a new multi-institution earthquake research center, which will receive $15 million from the National Science Foundation over five years to study the Cascadia subduction zone and bolster earthquake preparedness in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
Ashley Streig, associate professor of geology at PSU, will bring her expertise to CRESCENTAshley Streig, an associate professor of geology at PSU, will bring her expertise on active crustal faults and folds and paleoseismology to the Cascadia Region Earthquake Science Center (CRESCENT), the first center of its kind in the nation focused on earthquakes at subduction zones, where one tectonic plate slides beneath another.
The center, based at the University of Oregon, will unite scientists from 14 institutions across the U.S. studying the possible impacts of a major earthquake along the Cascadia subduction zone, an offshore tectonic plate boundary that stretches more than 1000 kilometers from southern British Columbia to northern California. It will advance earthquake research, foster community partnerships, and diversify and train the next generation geosciences workforce.
“The main goal of the center is to bring together the large group of geoscientists working in Cascadia to march together to the beat of a singular drum,” said Diego Melgar, associate professor of earth sciences at the University of Oregon and the director of the new center. “The center organizes us, focuses collaboration, and identifies key priorities, rather than these institutions competing.”
Streig said CRESCENT provides the researchers with the infrastructure and funding to work together in a way that will push the science forward. If they were to keep doing business as usual — doing their own science and occasionally coming together at annual meetings of the American Geophysical Union or Seismological Society of America — she said it would take another 40 or 50 years to get to where they need to be.
The Cascadia subduction zone has a long history of spurring large earthquakes, but scientists have only started to realize its power within the last few decades. Research shows that the fault is capable of producing an earthquake of magnitude 9.0 or greater — and communities along the U.S. West Coast are ill-prepared for a quake this powerful.
Such an event would set off a cascade of deadly natural hazards in the Cascadia region, from tsunamis to landslides. It could cause buildings and bridges to collapse, disrupt power and gas lines, and leave water supplies inaccessible for months.
CRESCENT’S work can help mitigate that damage. Scientists in the center will use the latest technology — including high performance computing and artificial intelligence — to understand the complex dynamics of a major subduction zone earthquake. They’ll gather data and develop tools to better forecast specific local and regional impacts from a quake. That knowledge will help communities to better prepare, by improving infrastructure and nailing down more informed emergency plans.
Streig will lead a Community Fault Model group tasked with building a comprehensive 3-D database of the active faults that run across the Pacific Northwest, including beneath major metro areas. The group will look to similar successful fault models developed by the Southern California Earthquake Center and GNS Science, New Zealand.
“In Year One, we’re going to try to roll out the first version, understanding that we’re going to keep iterating and it’ll only get better,” Streig said. “Ultimately, what we want to know is if we have an earthquake on one fault, for example the subduction zone, how does it change the stresses on another nearby fault - say onshore, will that fault fail in an earthquake?”
Streig said these complex earthquake scenarios aren’t unheard of — having occurred in Japan in 2011 and in New Zealand in 2016 — but they aren’t currently incorporated into the region’s emergency response plans.
“With a comprehensive fault model, we can come up with more realistic earthquake hazard scenarios and understand better what the seismic hazard is and how to respond,” she said.
Subduction zones in the US are understudied compared to other kinds of faults, and create distinctive earthquake dynamics that still aren’t fully understood, Melgar said. So, the lessons learned from CRESCENT’s work could also be applied to subduction zones in Alaska, the Caribbean, and around the world.
Community collaboration will be a major part of the center’s work. The CRESCENT team will work with communities impacted by hazards, regularly soliciting their input to guide research priorities. And they’ll build connections with public agencies, tribal groups, and private industry, so that scientific advances from the center will get translated into community action and policy.
The center will also work to increase diversity in geosciences and train the next generation of geoscientists in the latest technologies. For example, it will engage with minority-serving and tribal high schools to raise interest in and create pathways to geoscience careers, and provide fieldwork stipends and year-round paid research assistantships to support undergraduate students.
“The center will conduct research that is directly relevant to earthquake and tsunami hazards but too ambitious for any one scientist to take on individually,” said Amanda Thomas, the Chief Technical Officer for CRESCENT. “Our goal is to create community-endorsed research products that are immediately relevant for science and hazard estimates.”
Building resiliency in the region to face off “The Big One” is a much greater task than any institution can undertake on its own, Melgar said. Through the collaboration, community engagement, and scientific advances that CRESCENT enables, the Cascadia region’s shaky foundations will be strengthened.
CRESCENT participating institutions include:
University of Oregon
Central Washington University
Oregon State University
University of Washington
Cal Poly Humboldt
Cedar Lake Research Group
EarthScope Consortium
Portland State University
Purdue University
Smith College
Stanford University
UC San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
University of North Carolina-Wilmington
Virginia Tech
Washington State University
Western Washington University
Adapted from University of Oregon press release.