Q 01/05

Which country's records of a mystery tsunami let scientists date the last great Cascadia earthquake?

A) China

B) Russia

C) Japan

D) Peru

Answer · why

C) Japan

Japan logged waves that arrived with no shaking felt first, and working backwards from them put the rupture at about nine o'clock on a single evening ...

Q 02/05

What are the stands of dead grey trunks called that mark where the Cascadia coast dropped into the tides?

A) Ghost forests

B) Petrified forests

C) Stone forests

D) Cloud forests

Answer · why

A) Ghost forests

Ghost forests stand at more than thirty spots on the Oregon and Washington coast, where salt killed the trees but also held off the fungi that would r...

Q 03/05

Which mythical creature battles a whale in Pacific Northwest stories tied to the 1700 Cascadia earthquake?

A) Sasquatch

B) Thunderbird

C) Trickster Raven

D) Sea serpent

Answer · why

B) Thunderbird

Thunderbird seizes the whale and drops it from the sky in tellings shared by several coastal peoples, a struggle that shakes the mountains and flatten...

Q 04/05

Which magazine ran 'The Really Big One', the Pulitzer-winning article on the Cascadia earthquake threat?

A) The Atlantic

B) Harper's Magazine

C) Rolling Stone

D) The New Yorker

Answer · why

D) The New Yorker

The New Yorker piece earned staff writer Kathryn Schulz the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and a National Magazine Award.

Q 05/05

Which California fault meets the Cascadia subduction zone at a triple junction off Cape Mendocino?

A) San Andreas

B) Hayward

C) Garlock

D) San Jacinto

Answer · why

A) San Andreas

San Andreas quakes in the north may even be set off by Cascadia: traces of past shocks suggest most big ones of the last 3,000 years followed a Cascad...