New dangers and earthquake risks found in Washington

April 27, 2012 – WASHINGTON – Tectonically speaking, there’s a lot going on in the Pacific Northwest. Now add to that three more potentially dangerous faults in the Bellingham Basin, a tectonically active area along the coast of Washington, near the Canadian border. A team of researchers has discovered active tectonic faults in this region nearly 40 miles (60 kilometers) north of any previously known faults. The faults Blakely and his colleagues found are reverse faults — a type of tectonic fault where one side is shoved up over the other side — and the team estimates they’re capable of triggering magnitude-6.0 to -6.5 earthquakes. “That’s big enough to cause damage and hurt people, but it’s not as severe as a magnitude-7 earthquake, such as the one that occurred on the Seattle fault 1,100 years ago,” Blakely told OurAmazingPlanet. The team found the new faults through a bit of collaborative luck, Blakely said. He had been examining maps of magnetic anomalies in the region and noticed clues pointing to several unidentified faults in the area. When his colleagues in Washington showed him LiDAR images — data collected by an airborne laser tool that showed scarps (steep banks formed when a fault ruptures) in exactly the same areas — and paleoseismic records that indicated past earthquakes had shoved the ground upward several feet, they knew they had found something. The three faults the team identified are located near Birch Bay, Sandy Point and Drayton Harbor, all along the Pacific coast of northern Washington, about 20 miles (32 km) north of the city of Bellingham. –MSNBC

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