Pacific Northwest and Himalayas Could Experience Major Earthquakes, Geophysicists Say

The slow slip and tremor events in Cascadia are also being studied by Stanford geophysics Professor Paul Segall, although in an entirely different manner. Segall's group uses computational models of the region to determine whether the cumulative effects of many small events can trigger a major earthquake. "You have these small events every 15 months or so, and a magnitude 9 earthquake every 500 years. We need to known whether you want to raise an alert every time one of these small events happens," Segall said. "We're doing sophisticated numerical calculations to simulate these slow events and see whether they do relate to big earthquakes over time. What our calculations have shown is that ultimately these slow events do evolve into the ultimate fast event, and it does this on a pretty short time scale." FULL STORY