The big one could be coming: Author

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VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – It’s called the Cascadia Subduction Zone.  A crack in the earth’s crust running 1,100 kilometres along the shoreline from northern Vancouver Island to northern California.

Author Jerry Thompson has been researching the fault line for the past 25 years and says it’s the place where the ocean floor is trying to scrap underneath the edge of the continent.

“All along this 800 mile fault you’ve got these two big slabs of the earth’s crust scrapping against each other… they get stuck in place for hundreds of years.  They build up an enormous amount of strain that finally gets released in a huge earthquake with a magnitude of 9.0 or higher.”

That means there is roughly a 30 per cent chance that a monster quake could happen within the next 50 years.

The Zone is virtually identical to the fault line that caused the quake that hit Indonesia in 2004, and it would generate the same type of earthquake and tsunami.

“The fault itself is broken into about three or four segments and the southern end of it, down around California, breaks far more often.  It happens about every 240 years.  The fault up here, off Vancouver Island, breaks about 480 years.  The last time this happened was 311 years ago.”

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