The Most Recent Cascadia Earthquake and Native American Narratives

The Cascadia subduction zone fault lies just off the Pacific coast of the USA and Canada. Although this fault has been seismically inactive over the written history of the Cascadia region, it has the potential to produce catastrophic earthquakes and tsunamis. A variety of dating methods have been us...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Mathematical geosciences 2019-07, Vol.51 (5), p.683-690
Main Authors: Solow, Andrew, Beet, Andrew, McManus, Shauna
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Chemistry and Earth Sciences
Computer Science
Dating techniques
Earth and Environmental Science
Earth Sciences
Earthquakes
Geotechnical Engineering & Applied Earth Sciences
Hydrogeology
Mathematical models
Methods
Minority & ethnic groups
Narratives
Physics
Seismic activity
Statistical models
Statistics for Engineering
Subduction
Subduction (geology)
Subduction zones
Traditions
Tsunamis
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Summary:The Cascadia subduction zone fault lies just off the Pacific coast of the USA and Canada. Although this fault has been seismically inactive over the written history of the Cascadia region, it has the potential to produce catastrophic earthquakes and tsunamis. A variety of dating methods have been used to show that the most recent Cascadia earthquake occurred in 1700. Among these methods is an informal analysis of oral traditions handed down by Native American peoples that appear to refer to a major earthquake in this region. A central difficulty in analyzing these narratives quantitatively is their use of a generation and other qualitative measures of time that have no fixed lengths. Here, these narratives are analyzed under an explicit statistical model of the lengths of these measures. The results raise a question about the previous conclusion that these narratives all refer to the most recent Cascadia earthquake.
ISSN:1874-8961
1874-8953
DOI:10.1007/s11004-019-09783-y