An In-Depth Look at Cascadia’s Geographic and Geologic Connections & What Could Happen when a Megaquake Strikes

Cascadia Bioregion

A long title, I know. I took a long time considering what to title this article, and I eventually came to settle (inadvertent geology pun!) upon the above title. But hey, at least it expresses what you’ll be able to expect to read about in this article, and you didn’t have to suffer through my non-stop talking and thinking aloud that I do far too consistently! consider your souls only soft-boiled, and not vaporized in an open-air oven of magma. Therefore, you shall not be allowed to explode… yet. But with these frictional puns on your plates, it won’t be long before that pressure erupts violently and causes a chasm where my pithy and porous heart once resided.

Alright, ENOUGH HORRIBLE GEOLOGY PUNS! Let’s get educational and theoretical! WEEEEE!!!!

Cascadia. That one girlfriend that you swear you love and think is the most beautiful woman in the world that has brought you more peace and serenity than you ever had in your life thus far, until she decided to crush you in your home, drown you, and finally succeeded in killing you via burning you to death in heaps of blistering hot magma. It’s the ex-girlfriend that we all swear is a godsend until she kills us with her all natural chaotic and emotional rampage.

There is many analogies I could use to describe Cascadia’s subtle and well-hidden deadly chaos it releases once every 300 or so years, including explaining the city founders and planners as intensely stupid in an indirect and satirical way, but, why not go with the classics?

Cascadia is famous for it’s gorgeous and breathtaking wilderness and variety in ecosystems and environment. Cascading mountains, both in name and literally, smaller, coastal mountains, glorified hills, creeks and ditches somehow getting dubbed “rivers”, actual rivers, rivers full of mercury, PCBs, fertilizers (including your processed lunch fresh from your toilets), suicide victims, heavily deformed fish and frogs, along with forests, dead forests, burnt forests, cacti, deserts, beaches, and homeless encampments, too. We have it all.

But don’t let all that glorious beauty and good things fool you! Under us and all of it is a volatile and unpredictable pre-teen going through puberty, and it’s assigned guardians have barely scratched the surface of understanding even the beginning of it’s child’s life and history. Oh what fun! And by guardians, I’m referring to geologist, cartographers, and earth sciences experts.

See, Cascadia is known as the youngest geological location of the entire planet. Our location of earth is the youngest, you hear it right, and, it seems as more investigations go on, that age gap seems to increase, and grow ever younger in comparison to the second youngest place on earth geologically. The Cascadia Subduction Zone, where the Juan de Fuca, Pacific and North American (aka, Continental) plates each connect, was only officially discovered and documented in 1970. Literally, 1970, but 48 years ago! That’s it! On top of this, every year they discover lots more fault lines, and subduction zones across Cascadia.

One of the Cascadia Bioregional Maps (The full region is much larger than this)

One of the things geologist quickly discovered once they began taking their investigations seriously with our beloved region, they discovered that all of the Volcanoes in the Cascades range share the very same lava and gas chambers and tubes. That means, the main supply lines for the magma and gas within each Volcano is shared directly between all of them throughout the range. All of them, from the likes of Mt. St. Helens and Rainer, to Mt. Baker, Mt. Adams, Mt. Hood, Mt. Jefferson, Mt. Bachelor, Mt. Mazama (crater lake) and the Three Sisters, and even down through Mt. Shasta all share the same main lava & gas network.

They also have recently discovered within the last decade or so that these tubes and chambers also directly connect to the subduction zone off the Oregon & Washington coastlines.

This poses the very interesting possibility that when the Cascadia Tricentennial strikes, predicted to be the biggest quake ever by many experts with various geologic centers who have often asserted a likely magnitude of 10.0 or higher, of the quake triggering a chain reaction of eruptions throughout the cascades range.

Most people however do not even begin to realize this possibility or even think of it, and those who do like to treat it as if impossible. But the harsh reality is, it is actually a fairly high likelihood of possibility when all things are accounted for and considered.

They know that we are in Cascadia geologically directly connected and almost symbiotic with Japan’s coastal geology too. In the years of 2011 & 2012, during and after the foreshocks, the main shock and aftershocks of the Fukushima 9.0 earthquake, they intently watched and monitored the Cascadian region for anything out of the ordinary as well as any signs of having it’s own megaquake as a result of this knowledge. Our Tricentennial megaquake could indeed cause Japan to suffer a similar quake themselves, so when we do have ours, it would not be out of the ordinary for them to have their very own megaquake too, within at most about a year to two years after ours.

Another thing to consider is the fact that the majority of Cascadia, specially all the land and cities from the crest of the cascade range west are likely to be reduced to rubble and dust, and even sink out of existence, due to being built on swamp and marshlands, as well as springs and deltas. What’s worse is that much of the Seattle-Tacoma and Portland-Vancouver regions are built not just upon those filled in swamps and marshes, deltas and springs, but upon river and volcanic silt and ash.

Imagine… Portland, especially downtown will likely be reduce to near complete dust and rubble.
Imagine Seattle, and all the towns and cities surrounding the Puget Sound and Lake Washington, gone to ruins, dust and rubble.

To compound that set of issues, is the fact most of the pacific northwest is built with it’s electrical and gas lines underground, alongside and with the water and sewer lines. Add in the dead, and the maimed and severely injured to this mess, and you’ve got yourself a much worse catastrophe than anyone is willing to imagine and think about happening. The disease, fires, poisonings and other issues would just be much further worsened with this, as all four of these lines would rupture, burst and shatter without fail, and would permeate, fill & flood the now dust, mud, water, tree, debris and rubble filled world we still call home at the time. The gas lines breaking alongside the sewer lines and electrical lines… yeah, that’ll get you a constant fireball and explosive combo that’ll also do a great job of electrocuting you while you inhale and breathe all the highly toxic air full of gases, smoke, dust, must, ash, fire, and so on.

And of course, it could get even worse than that… as we must also note & consider the fact that with each megaquake that was 9.0 or over in Cascadia’s past, the rivers completely rerouted themselves. This means they could show up anywhere, and also exposes the fact that the physical geography of our landscapes changed drastically. No matter where they, and the land gets reshaped, rerouted and reset, it will n doubt cause even further distress and catastrophe to occur.

These are the most likely catastrophic things that could very well happen during and even soon after our tricentennial megaquake.

Now let’s talk about the attempt at migration and self-evacuation from the valleys of western Washington, and the Willamette here in Oregon.

One would likely think to get out of the main destruction zones to safer, less demolished and affected areas, which for both Washington and Oregon would be east of the Cascades. There of course would be no airports running, and many if not most would be destroyed in some capacity, so obviously flight is not an option. Most roads would be in ruins and no fuel would be able to be had anyway, so that too is obviously not an option. The two main things people would default to doing in order to “escape” the catastrophe, and in as always, a royal hurry. Undoubtedly, people will still be overly determined to drive their ways out of here, and east of the mountains to the high desert. This “migration” is what is typically referred to as “The Mass Exodus”. Many will look to take the long trek by foot to the east, whereas many others will do the prior out of a panicked rush and form of desperation.

In Oregon, a handful of counties were spoken to by the US Feds, and the Military to talk about the prevention of the “exodus” to central and eastern Oregon, and explosives being install under the main road networks that allowed travel west-east through the cascades in case the inevitable happened. When it does, they’ve agreed to set off the explosives to destroy the roads in a bid to prevent people from evacuating and moving east. Sherman county was the first to agree to do this, while Wasco was spoken to first about it, and would be the second to agree to go along with the plans.

But the real question is, even if the exodus were allowed and even encouraged to east of the cascades, where exactly do people expect to go, and do they expect to be able to set their roots back down wherever they end up being? This is more of a personal curiosity of mine than anything important, really. I just can’t really think of any places or things practical enough to warrant expending so much time, energy and mental and emotional bandwidth to trek, whether via foot, or via vehicle across the mountains to the desert. Sure, it’ll allow you a kind of blindness to the horrors you’d be leaving behind likely in an attempt to lessen your own mental and emotional suffering… but… does it really get you much of anything else?

Now, let’s touch on something people are seeming to care and worry more about — The potential that our Cascadia Tricentennial Megaquake could easily end up setting off a megaquake down in SoCal along the San Andreas fault line (inner me feels fulfilled and amused imagining SoCal getting decimated, much to the dismay of SJWs and Cali residents and fans). It is believed and assumed that there is at least a “relationship” as geologists dub it, between the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and the San Andreas fault, with the last 13 out of 15 5.0 or higher quakes of the CSZ coinciding with quakes of the same or similar size along the San Andreas fault line within a 1–3 year period.

If one takes into consideration the direct connections between all of the Cascades Range volcanoes and then them also being directly connected to the CSZ, which is a substantial distance away from the western foothills of the Cascades range, and then also considers the fact that the Cascades comes to a whisping end at the northern edge of the Sierra Nevadas, and directly attaches to the coast range/Siskyou range (technically one & the same by extreme Southwestern Oregon and Extreme northwestern Cali), and finally sees the direct flow and connections throughout the fault lines and plate borders, one would assume that they too are a part of this direct connection. This then is further when venturing on the direction connection the CSZ has to Japan’s fault lines. And then more so considering the Ring of Fire of the Pacific, which is literally the whole of the pacific rim. The Pacific Plate has a hell of a lot of power and dictation, and seems to be the main source of everything being so intertwined throughout the pacific rim. So my thoughts and theory is that the San Andreas Fault is not just related to our Cascadian geology, but directly connected itself, much like all the other connections I’ve noted thus far.

And here, we make it to the more speculative and semi-unrelated part.

The thought of the Cascadia Tricentennial Megaquake causing Yellowstone to blow full force.

Geologist, as well as some native tribes and locals to Cascadia have speculated and debated if the Yellowstone Super-volcano is directly connected to the Cascadian lava & gas tubes, and thus the CSZ. Geologists have speculated and taken guesses with the limited data and knowledge they have and a few have noted that they personally feel with what we know the CSZ is connected to thus far, it would make a lot of sense that Yellowstone would be connected and a part of the same massive system too. However, they only speculate thus far (kind of like transit operators shootin’ the breeze over day old Seattle’s Best Coffee while riding a train back to wherever they parked their cars after work) since most of their time is dedicated to studying the volcanoes in our Cascades, as well as studying the subduction zone, and the oceanic geology off our coastlines.

There is some native history that suggests the connection between the two too, with the oldest account of speculation on it dating back over 250 years, and is said to have been accounted when it was spoken about among the various tribes that would congregate along the rivers for their trade meets and potlatches.

This article isn’t and was never intended to seem “expert” or “professional” in any way, shape or form. It was created with simple possibilities and likelihoods of what could happen that has a much better chance than anyone is really willing to imagine, let alone pay attention to, in an effort to express them, and get them out there for people to take in and learn about.

I have studied and watched USGS, PNSN and more, as well as read about various native accounts on the changes that have occurred, and the their recounts of the quakes for over 10 years now. I also have put the same amount of years into watching the activity of the Pacific Rim, and it’s cycles, rhythms and habits, as read accounts throughout history of it as well. One of the major things I came to learn is that everything in the earth and in nature is deeply interconnected and intertwined in some way, shape or form, and one can learn to tell when various sequences and things have a the greatest chances of happening. You of course also will become accustomed to what is a normal and expected occurrence vs a not so normal one. I.e, Japan, Indonesia or the South Pacific Islands like Vanuatu, Tonga or Fiji getting fairly frequently nailed by 5, 6 & 7 magnitude quakes, and those kinds of quakes being rather obscure and strange in north-central Siberia. But again, I am not claiming any kind of expertise, but am noting that I have learned a substantial amount from taking so much time invested in investigating and observing the geological and historical rhythm and cycles of the earth.

Nevertheless, this article will now seize (har), self-immolate (har har) and blow (hardy har har har).

Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ve gain some insight on things you may not have thought about or even known. Feel free to share this somewhat disorganized mess of an article around to wherever and with whomever you please, and an extra special thanks to any & all who do this, and/or share this blog around! I really appreciate it a heck of a lot!

Stay safe and have a great day & night everyone! See you in the next article, maybe? :)

TOON | Transport, Opinion & Other News
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