Page 5 - Subduction Zone News Today

When sea sediment melts inside the Earth, it helps tectonic plates slide over one another smoothly.

Doorframe but this thing was so powerful, it sent things swinging. the lawyer here and this is being relayed by the associated press, this attorney says its the worst hes seen in the eight years hes lived in anchorage. i know youre getting some reports he mentioned, that employee of senator lisa murkowskis office, what else did you learn? s demand that nerves are rattled a bit, one thing i can tell you is the pacific northwest seismic network again with major operation here monitors says its hap...

This point mckenzie is just across cook inlet. done some stories on the bridge to nowhere. one of those bridges to nowhere was supposed to cross over that area of the cook inlet, to point mckenzies there was a heavily populated area just north of anchorage, but you mentioned about the tsunami warnings, its interest interesting because youre talking about smaller waves in the inlet but those tsunami warnings have not been issued further down the coast into seattle so i talked to the seismology fo...

Front but because that great compression is continuing to go on, then behind that fault further north theres a lot of smaller faults that handle things getting redistributed and this is one of the faults on the backside of the subduction zone but the earth is active with big pieces of it moving around and the pa sick ocean under alaska is one of the biggest pieces of that plate tectonic stance. >> lucy, thank you so much for joining me today and helping us understand this. an earthquake that hit...

And theyre saying this isnt even the big one. how can that be? >> the big one was in 1960, 9.5 and over land. thats a big one. another thing going on here, this is a subduction zone, the line between two plates, the south american plate here the nazca plate, diving under the south american plate, building the andy mountains, doing that for millions and millions of years. the problem with the big earthquakes we see here, unlike other subduction zones, this is the crease here, this plate would be ...

Of the subduction zone. its just the way that nature works. the pacific plates are always moving. and where theres a junction between the pacific plate and land, eventually the pressure builds up and breaks. and so its a recurring cycle. the same thing happens off of the washington-oregon coast. >> frank gonzales or noaa, thanks for joining us. now on the phone lucy jones of the u.s. geological survey. lucy, reuters is saying early reports of landslides partially blocking some roads. is that wha...

Slip in this magnitude 8.2 was deeper on that subduction zone. perhaps 30 to 40 kilometers deep, rather than, you know, 10 to 20 kilometers, like we saw very large slip in japan. and so when you get that very shallow, large slip, you get a big tsunami. in terms of the hazard for -- the coast around the pacific, yes, there would be one from a large earthquake in chile, as we saw in 1960 and again in 2010. >> the thing that certainly saved lives here, we know there are six people that have been re...

Three days ago. this is a great quake. we did not have a great quake in california. we were down here. but let me show you that same shake map for california. we had the same colors right here because it was right under that area of los angeles. so this is the quake, its the same shaking as they saw down here, but you have to assume that the buildings in los angeles have been retrofitted, with a little better quality structure than we have down in chile. heres what happened, heres why its signif...

>> yeah. this place manufactures earthquakes all the time. back in 2010, there was a large earthquake that killed more than 550 people. and its because of the nature of the subduction zone. its just the way that nature works. the pacific plates are always moving. and where theres a junction between the pacific plate and land, eventually the pressure builds up and breaks. and so its a recurring cycle. the same thing happens off of the washington-oregon coast. >> frank gonzales or noaa, thanks for...

New information, we always take that information into consideration and make changes, if necessary. but right now we continue to believe that nuclear power plants in this country operate safely and securely. >> so, chad myers is back. the obvious question, we have nuclear plants, we have fault lines, and then a huge ocean, obviously. california comes to mind for me. could this happen here? >> it could. but the only real subduction zone, like the one in japan, is well into northern california, up...