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Meet the earthquake that drowned the Pacific Northwest.

Secrets of the Ghost Forest

the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

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<div class="rich-text">Meet the earthquake that drowned the Pacific Northwest and transformed a once lush landscape into a ghost forest.
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Meet the earthquake that drowned the Pacific Northwest. 

<div class="rich-text">Meet the earthquake that drowned the Pacific Northwest. </div>

Secrets of the Ghost Forest 

Planet Earth

<div class="rich-text"><h3>
 Secrets of the Ghost Forest
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 Published: July 5, 2017



 Kirk Johnson
 
 : Meet paleoseismologist Brian Atwater. He and I are paddling up the Copalis, a coastal river that rises and falls with Pacific Ocean tides. We’re here at low tide but at high tide the river can rise enough to overflow its banks, flooding the surrounding marshes with salt water. But it wasn’t always that way. Once this was a lush coastal rainforest; now all that remains are massive roots sticking out of the eroded riverbank and the trunks of long dead cedar trees. A ghost forest. Brian has brought me here to show me evidence of one of the worst earthquakes that hit North America since human beings arrived here. Slicing into the bank reveals three layers. They tell a story of change over time. The lowest once supported a healthy rainforest.



 Brian Atwater
 
 : So this is almost like a garden soil, right? But its got tree roots in it, it’s a forest floor soil.



 Johnson
 
 : Just above is a layer of sand, entirely out of place. Its sharp definition tells Atwater that whatever put it here, came fast and furious.



 Atwater
 
 : How do we do this combination? How do we go from forest floor to some kind of muddy flat and have a sand layer brought in first?



 Johnson
 
 : The answer lies about eighty miles away, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. It’s called the Cascadia subduction zone, a seven-hundred-mile-long crack in the crust of the planet. It’s where a Pacific Ocean plate is trying to slide under the North American plate. But the plates are stuck.



 Atwater
 
 : They go closer and closer like that and the overriding plate gets shortened and bulges up.



 Johnson
 
 : The old growth forest that once stood around the Copalis river sat on that bulge. But then the plates broke free along the fault, causing a violent earthquake, dropping six-hundred miles of coastline as much as five feet and into the tidal zone. That same tectonic rupture also drove the edge of the continental plate upward and triggered a series of huge waves, a tsunami. What the forest sees is a rush of salt water and sand inundating the land, the final blow from a massive fault rupture that turned an old growth rainforest into this. We now know that this cataclysmic one-two punch took place in the year 1700. Today everyone wants to know, will it happen again?

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