More than 55 earthquakes strike off the coast of Oregon

More than 50 earthquakes have shaken the ocean floor off the coast of Oregon in the past two days. But scientists say the earthquake risk is low in threatening life or property on Earth.

The earthquakes, 55 of them as of midday on Wednesday (December 9), were in the magnitude range 4.0 to 5.5, with the largest of them being 5.8, according to the US Geological Survey. It occurred in an area known as the Blanco Fault Zone, an area that often trembles with moderate-sized earthquakes.

Blanco’s proximity to the Cascadia Subduction sometimes leads to concerns that earthquakes in the Blanco fault zone will add fault stress to the Cascadia. These faults are capable of causing very large earthquakes along the coast of Oregon and Washington. But seismologists say this is not a threat.

“There is a very long distance from these earthquakes to the Cascadia subduction zone,” Harold Tobin, director of the Pacific Northwest Seismological Network at the University of Washington, told CNN. “Our current best understanding of how stress is transmitted through the crust (and mantle) indicates that these events do not significantly alter the stress on the subduction zone.”

The Blanco fault zone is located approximately 200 miles (322 km) from the Cascadia subduction zone. In Cascadia, Juan de Fuca’s plate sinks under the North American plate. This diving motion is known as subduction, and it can produce large and destructive earthquakes. Up-down movement of the crust in subduction zones can also cause dangerous tsunamis.

But Blanco is a nicer, gentler fault zone. It is located where the Juan de Fuca plate and the Pacific plate rub against each other. It is a shift error area, also known as slip limit. As the name implies, this means that the plates slide past each other with very little up and down movement. While slip faults (such as the San Andreas fault) can lead to dangerous earthquakes, the lack of perpendicular motion on the fault means that the risk of a tsunami from the Blanco earthquake is low, according to a 2019 blog post from Scientific American.

The crust in the Blanco fault zone is also small and relatively warm, compared to the more fragile continental crust found in a fault like the San Andreas, according to that publication. Younger, warmer crust breaks more easily at smaller events, and seismic waves don’t travel as much as they travel in older, cooler crust. The fault zone is far enough from shore that waves from the larger earthquakes in the Blanco fault zone do not reach the land.

For all these reasons, scientists were not alarmed by this week’s earthquake.

“In the past 20 years alone, there have been 91 earthquakes of magnitude 5.0 or greater on the Blanco River,” Tobin wrote on Twitter. “This happens a lot!”

Originally published on Live Science.

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