a 600-mile geologic boundary just off the Pacific Northwest coast. Along this fraught stretch, called the Cascadia Subduction Zone, two pieces of the Earth’s crust slide against each other ...

In regions of convergence, one plate can sink under another in a subduction zone, or two colliding plates can form a mountain belt. At divergent boundaries, plates move away from each other and ...

Plates at subduction zones typically move just a few centimeters per year. But when accumulated stress at these convergent plate boundaries releases suddenly, the plates can slip several meters ...

marks the approximate northern limit of the subduction zone. Megathrust events with magnitudes that may exceed 9 occur every 200-600 years on the inter-plate boundary, where it is locked west of ...

Discover interesting facts about how big earthquakes can get, why earthquakes happen, and why they're so hard to predict.

The data also showed that segments of one of the tectonic plates in the subduction zone are smooth and flat, making it primed to cause stronger quakes because smoother boundaries make more contact ...

Figure 1: Slip along the plate boundary fault of a subduction zone. Although a recent analysis of NVT in Cascadia supports its origin at the plate boundary interface, (K. Creager, Univ.