Coastal quake risk: Japan on watch, Northwest ‘essentially blind’
The Cascadia Subduction Zone is as dangerous as offshore faults in Japan, but there’s a lack of earthquake-monitoring instruments on the ocean floor in the Pacific Northwest.
By Sandi Doughton
SeattleTimes.com
August 30, 2014
TOKYO — If you expect your sensors to transmit data from the seafloor for a decade or more, it pays to do a lot of testing upfront.
That’s why Eiichiro Araki and fellow researchers from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology set up shop earlier this year in an equipment plant on the outskirts of Tokyo.
“We need to make sure everything is working,” Araki explained, as his team ran electrical checks and analyzed signals from seismometers, pressure gauges and tiltmeters arrayed around a room the size of a gymnasium. Once the instruments are cemented into a half-mile-deep borehole under 6,500 feet of water, it’ll be too late to fix glitches.
Araki’s goal is to spy on the infamous Nankai Trough — a submarine fault so similar to the one that lurks off the coast of the Pacific Northwest scientists call them sisters. Both are capable of unleashing megaquakes and tsunamis on a par with the disaster that struck Japan’s Tohoku coast in 2011. And both faults lie so far from shore that land-based instruments provide only a fuzzy view.
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