The hole in the bottom of the ocean that could trigger a huge US earthquake

There’s a hole in the ocean, and water is flowing into it. The researchers have named it Pythia’s Oasis, and it’s a spring of almost-fresh water most welling up from under the ocean floor through a fault known as the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The spring was accidentally discovered, but will it cause a problem for humanity? (Picture: Getty)

Brendan Philip spotted the bubbles the almost-fresh water spring brought up to the surface, and the study on the vent was released by Mr Philip and the rest of the research team from the University of Washington. However, even through bubbles do come up from the ocean, usually through hydrothermal vents, a spring can be a bit more worrying (Picture: Getty)

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If the water does not stay in the spring, then parts of the US may be at a higher risk of a massive earthquake. The Cascadian Subduction Zone is a large strike-slip fault off the coast of the Pacific Northwest and is where two of the tectonic plates that make up the Earth’s crust meet up and slide alongside each other. The water from Pythia’s Oasis acts as lubrication between these two plates (Picture: Getty)

Co-author Dr Evan Soloman said: ‘They explored in that direction and what they saw was not just methane bubbles, but water coming out of the seafloor like a firehose. That’s something that I’ve never seen, and to my knowledge has not been observed before. The megathrust fault zone is like an air hockey table. If the fluid pressure is high, it’s like the air is turned on, meaning there’s less friction and the two plates can slip. If the fluid pressure is lower, the two plates will lock – that’s when stress can build up’ (Picture: Getty)

But if the stress builds up, it has to go somewhere. If there is too much stress, and the system has to jerk, it would trigger an earthquake – and it’s likely it would be a big one. The researchers believe that a release of stress in the Cascadia Subduction Zone could trigger a magnitude-9 tremor which could affect many of those in the northwestern US. And the only thing we can do is monitor the plates (Picture: Getty)

Co-author Dr Deborah Kelley said: ‘Pythias Oasis provides a rare window into processes acting deep in the seafloor, and its chemistry suggests this fluid comes from near the plate boundary. This suggests that the nearby faults regulate fluid pressure and megathrust slip behavior along the central Cascadia Subduction Zone’ (Picture: Getty)

Dr Soloman said that this is the first known site of its kind. Similar fluid seep sites may exist nearby, but they are hard to detect from the ocean’s surface. But a significant leak near central Oregon could explain why the northern portion of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, off the coast of Washington, is believed to be more strongly locked, than the southern section off the coast of Oregon (Picture: Getty)

The hole in the bottom of the ocean that could trigger a huge US earthquake

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