Washington State’s Puget Sound could face previously unknown earthquake risks, according to a new study that has pinned down the date of an ancient earthquake using tree rings and the radiation left by a mysterious cosmic force
Washington State’s Puget Sound—home to the metropolises of Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia—is a sitting duck for a major earthquake, whether it comes in the form of a deep tremor triggered by a fragmenting tectonic plate, a shallow crustal fracture or an almighty megathrust on the boundary where one tectonic plate tumbles beneath another.
Scientists know plenty of quakes have hit Puget Sound over the past few millennia. But the exact timing and manner of these ruptures is hazy. “Modern seismological instrumentation for global earthquake observations has only been around for a few decades, which is short, compared with the large earthquake cycles of hundreds to thousands of years,” says Zhe Jia, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who wasn’t involved with the new study.
Fortunately, the field of dendrochronology can come to the rescue. Tree trunks have growth rings; each concentric circle represents one year. Sample enough living trees in a region, and you can produce a tree-ring “barcode” that spans the hundreds or thousands of years various tree species can live. If you examine the tree-ring pattern on a dead tree that is preserved by mud and water, you can compare it with the living-tree-ring barcode and work out exactly what year the dead tree perished.
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