The seismic research ship heads to Boom Boom in search of answers at the origin of the next big ship

Seismic researchers are eager to dig into a set of new data about the offshore Cascadia fault zone. When Cascadia erupts, it can trigger a giant earthquake known as the “Great Earthquake.” Invaluable new imaging of the geology off the coasts of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia comes from a specialized research vessel.

The National Science Foundation’s seismic survey ship Marcus Langseth has been jagged and jagged for nearly six weeks along the entire length of the Cascadia undersea — from the Oregon-California border north to Vancouver Island. The research expedition departed from Newport, Oregon, on June 1 and returned to shore in Seattle late Sunday.

“It would be a tremendous asset for us to understand Cascadia,” co-chief scientist Brian Boston of Columbia University said, moments after the ship left after 41 days at sea.

The primary goal is to produce a much clearer picture of the subsea rift region, said fellow senior scientist Susan Carpott, a geophysicist from Columbia University. Many scientists, including she, suspect that there are two plates colliding, or “locking” together, creating an increased tension that sooner or later will be released in a catastrophic earthquake.

“For this expedition, we were using modern technology that is significantly superior in terms of what people can learn from the data that has been obtained before,” Karbut said in an interview. “The photography we’ll get here will be in a different category than what we have.”

The expedition used sound to probe the miles below the sea floor. A group of underwater compressed air guns directed buzzing sonic booms at the sea floor.

“It goes to the bottom of the sea and then it penetrates because it has a lot of low frequencies in it and then it gets reflected, bounces off horizons in the ground, which is very similar to a 3D CT scan,” Karbut said.

Reflected echoes were picked up by receivers on the ground, on the sea floor and on a 12-kilometre cable that was towed behind the research vessel.

This kind of noisy underwater seismic work has had the potential to annoy environmentalists. Ocean activists are concerned about disruption to protected marine mammals off the Pacific coast – especially whales.

The chief scientists on the voyage said they deployed lookout points and an advanced expedition ship to make sure there were no whales or dolphins nearby when they were making their underwater paddle.

“Anytime it becomes an issue that we might hurt or damage a whale, we immediately shut down the experiment,” Boston said. “It was about protecting these species at sea and not trying to harass them.”

Boston said shutdowns are occurring infrequently, less than he thought they would, mainly from encounters with humpback whales.

One of the researchers passionate about looking at the terabytes of data collected through this seismic survey is University of Washington professor and director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network Harold Tobin. Tobin came down to the Seattle pier to greet the returning ship. He said one thing much-improved imaging of the Cascadia fault zone won’t tell us is when it will strike the next big star.

“It wouldn’t help us very much in predicting the timing directly,” Tobin said. “What you will do is establish this understanding and baseline of what the error actually looks like and then how changes in some properties we can measure — like the speed of sound waves across the Earth — if that changes over time, can tell us new things about how the error changes its pressure.”

Tobin expects many other ideas to emerge. For example, we can get a much better idea of ​​the degree to which a 700-mile marine fault is divided into shorter segments with different characteristics.

“The reason this is important is that it might make a difference between a single magnitude 9 that rips everything apart — or breaks the entire fault — or, a series of smaller earthquakes, maybe still 8 magnitude earthquakes, but that would have very different ramifications, let’s say, to tsunami risk,” Tobin said.

An improved understanding of tsunami risks could also come from 3D imaging of the upper layer of ocean sediments above the tectonic plate boundary. The way the sea floor moves or slides in response to the powerful Cascadia earthquake that began below has a lot to do with the severity of the tsunami.

Tobin said he expects the first search results based on newly collected data to appear next year and continue for years to come.

“We still have a lot of mysteries about the Cascadia subduction zone despite all those decades of study,” Tobin said.

The expedition began to find answers to what Karbot called “a lot of tricky spots”. They had issues with flabby instruments, and then fishing gear got stuck in the very long listening cable. After that, the rough seas completely ripped the listening cable. It was recovered quickly and data collection was back on track.

“I am very happy to be back on Earth,” said Shushu Han, the third chief scientist of the expedition. Han said the team considered the campaign a huge success because they ended up getting more than 90% of their data goals.

The National Science Foundation provided the core funding for the research trip. NSF owns Marcus Langseth, which is operated by Columbia University. The USGS has also been heavily involved in this project, Karbut said.

The last complete rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone occurred in January 1700. The exact date and destructive power of the buried forests along the Pacific Northwest coast and the “orphan tsunami” that swept ashore in Japan were determined.

Geologists who have dug into coastal swamps and offshore valley bottoms have also found evidence of previous major earthquakes and tsunamis. The radiocarbon dating of these events makes it possible to estimate the interval of recurrence of the Cascadia mega-earthquakes approximately every 250 to 800 years. Since the last strike 321 years ago, that means the densely populated Northwest Territory is within the next Big One window. [Copyright 2021 Northwest News Network]

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