Are More Quakes on the Way?

Major new earthquakes in New Zealand make us wonder: Are more on the way–and if so, where will they strike? Scientists are warning that the northwest coast of the US could be devastated by a huge movement of undersea plates known as a "megathrust" earthquake, despite the fact that this fault line has been dormant for 300 years. "Megathrusts" are the world’s largest earthquakes, which happen in a "subduction zone"–a region where one of the earth’s tectonic plates is underneath another.

The Juan de Fuca plate is being forced under the North America plate along the Cascadia fault and, as large parts of the plates are locked together, stress is being built up. The Daily Mail quotes seismologist Chris Goldfinger as saying, "It’s a loading a spring for a future earthquake, there’s no doubt about that." The last quake involving the Cascadia fault, which starts in Vancouver and stretches along the Washington-Oregon coastline down to California, is estimated to have been a 9 on the Richter scale.

The Mail quotes geologist Jeffrey Park as saying, "History tells us that more megathrust earthquakes could occur in the next decade, but we have no evidence that the recent rate of nearly one megathrust per year will persist for longer than that." They quote geophysicist John McCloskey as saying, "The problem with using a recurrence timeline is that earthquakes can be more like buses, coming two or three at a time rather than regularly."

The atmosphere above Japan heated rapidly prior to the great earthquake and tsunami of 2011, leading to the possibility that atmospheric monitoring from existing satellites might improve earthquake prediction. Scientists believe the odds of such an event occurring in the near future have now reached the 50-50 range–meaning that they just don’t know. But when it does strike there will be little or no warning. In Helium.com, Terrence Aym quotes Tom Jordan, of the Southern California Earthquake Center, as saying, "We don’t know how to tell you, ‘Hey, next week, you know, get out of town there’s going to be a big earthquake.’"

When the Master of the Key burst into Whitley Strieber’s hotel room in Toronto in 1998, he didn’t talk about earthquakes, but he DID clue Whitley in about climate change–something he didn’t know anything about at the time. But when he researched it, he found it was all TRUE. The new, uncensored version of The Key (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show) is in bookstores NOW!