The Student Newspaper of Highline College

Sondury Rodriguez/THUNDERWORD

Earthquakes can shake the globe

Jessica Cuevas Staff Reporter Mar 16, 2023

Earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest can be just as scary as the ones in Turkey, with long lasting effects.

Over 300 years ago a gigantic earthquake shook the Western Washington area and left an impact on historical events we see today. 

On January 26, 1700, at approximately 9 p.m. an earthquake of around 8.7 to 9.2 magnitude struck Western Washington grounds for around 5 minutes, Highline instructor Stephaney Puchalski said in an email. 

Sondury Rodriguez/THUNDERWORD

“[It] generated a tsunami and violently shook the ground for three to five minutes as witnessed by the Japanese and indigenous people living along the coastal interior of the Pacific Northwest,” the email said. 

Sources from four Japanese locals tell the story as a six to 10-foot tsunami wave that flooded towns along Japan’s main island of Honshu Island on January 27, 1700, at around midnight, Puchalski said. 

“They called it an ‘orphan tsunami’ because there was no accompanying earthquake in Japan,” the email said. 

However, this one earthquake opened a connection to the Pacific Northwest, Puchalski said.

“Scientists later linked the tsunami to the earthquake in the Pacific Northwest. The tsunami took about 10 hours to travel across the Pacific Ocean before hitting Japan’s eastern coast without warning,” the email said. 

Various Indigenous tribes among the Pacific Northwest have diverse ways of interpreting the amount of destruction from the event, “…plains becoming oceans, mudslides, entire villages thrown into the air, and so on,” Puchalski said. 

“The Hoh of the Forks area of the Olympic Peninsula talk of an enormous ‘shaking, jumping and trembling of the earth.’ The Makah, who live on Neah Bay at the northwest tip of the continent, tell about an earthquake at night and the survival of only those who fled inland before the ocean swept everyone else away,” were just some of the traditional tales told by the tribes that the email said. 

This traumatic event that occurred over 300 years ago was due to the Cascadia Subduction Zone that caused the earthquake and later tsunami, Puchalski said.

“Geologic evidence gives us estimates of the earthquake magnitude and its source as a 620-mile-long rupture of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which extends from Vancouver Island, British Columbia to Cape Mendocino in northern California and is the boundary between the Juan de Fuca plate and the North American plate – two of the tectonic plates that make up the Earth’s surface. The rupture dropped most of the Pacific Northwest coastline three to six feet and generated a tsunami, up to 33 feet high,” the email said. 

Evidence has even shown that the sources from earthquakes are not only rooted from Cascadia’s erupting, but also some that occur unexpectedly, Puchalski said. 

“Deep-source earthquakes, like the 2001 Nisqually earthquake, occur every 30-50 years on average but there was a mere 16 years between one in 1949 and another in 1965,” the email said.

With the recent 7.8 earthquake in Southern Turkey on February 6, 2023, at around 4 a.m., the earthquake did a lot of damage to cities nearby. 

“The earthquake affected the neighboring provinces of Adıyaman, Kilis, Osmaniye, Gaziantep, Malatya, as well as Sanliurfa, Diyarbakir, Adana and Hatay, where around 13.5 million people reside including around 2 million Syrian refugees,” reliefweb said in an article.

But aftershocks from the earthquake caused even more damage to the buildings and people who lived in these cities, the website said.

“According to WHO, the affected regions in Turkey and Syria are home to around 23 million people including 1.4 million children,” reliefweb said. “Many aftershocks followed the earthquake and a second major earthquake hit the region after 9 hours with 7.5 magnitude causing serious further damage and destruction of damaged buildings.”

Reliefweb also said the earthquake in Turkey resulted in the death of 38,044 people, injured 108,068 people, and over 50,000 buildings either crumbled or were damaged.

Therefore, reliefweb said people affected by the earthquake had nowhere else to go and were left practically stranded.

“Due to the risk of further damage as a result of aftershocks, people are not able to go into their houses, therefore staying outdoors in the cold and rainy weather,” reliefweb said.

Why is this important? This area (as well as the entire west coast) is prone to earthquakes, whether it be the Cascadia 9.0 earthquake in 1700, or the 6.8 Nisqually earthquake that occurred in 2001. In addition to those major earthquakes, minor earthquakes may go unnoticed, but they can happen as well. As of June 2016, the King County Emergency Management spent four days practicing proper safety procedures and plans, the King County website said.

How can you prepare for the next one? Being alert of your surroundings and knowing whether it is a liquefaction area, as they can be hit the hardest, practicing the drop, cover, and hold on procedure during an earthquake, having a fire extinguisher available and knowing how and when to use it, securing appliances within your home, this may include cabinets, bookcases, televisions, and getting the foundation of your home checked if it was built before 1977, the King County website said.

For more information on ways, you can prepare for an earthquake, you may click here: King County website. 

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