Hi All. It seems maybe some good came from the El Nino storm although that depends upon how one looks at it.

If the following time frame is correct then this rules out the megaquake of Jan. 1700.

This in turn would mean that Oregon has its own quake, or quakes that could submerge a whole shoreline.

Heavy beach erosion, spurred by this winter's powerful El Nino, opened a window into the Oregon coast's catastrophic past. Roger Hart, a marine geologist with Oregon State University did a study about Oregon coasts.

Winter storms scoured more than 10 vertical feet of sand from the beach at Neskowin, revealing an eerie forest of stumps buried after an earthquake 2,000 years ago.

In February, more than 200 stumps emerged from the beach north of Cascade Head. The sand forest offers clues to the seismic mayhem that shaped the Northwest coast.

Hart said the Neskowin stumps were last exposed in 1983 during another powerful El Nino event. The warming of Pacific Ocean waters raises the height of the eastern Pacific and accelerates coastal erosion.

Radiocarbon dating shows the Neskowin stumps are between 1,700 and 2,000 years old, Hart said. How this ancient forest was swallowed under a gray beach offers a sobering glimpse into the violent past - and perhaps future - of the Oregon coast.

Hart has documented buried stumps at 23 sites on the coast. He said it is possible that beach sands hide a band of buried forest from Neskowin to Florence.

During the winter of 1983 erosion exposed 4,000-year-old stumps at Beverly Beach State Park, north of Newport. As sands shift, Hart said, beach stumps are periodically unearthed at places such as China and Cape creeks, north of Florence; at the Yachats River and Starr Creek; at Moore and Deer creeks, south of Newport; and at Spencer, Coal and Moolack creeks, north of Yaquina Head.

David Yamaguchi an environmental scientist at the University of Washington and Brian Atwater, a geologist with the U.S. Geologic Survey in Seattle, published a paper documenting the quake of 1700. "This history will repeat itself," Atwater said. He said seven coastal earthquakes have been documented in the Northwest. The most recent quake, the 1700 event, took 800 years to incubate. But Atwater says the geologic record indicates the intervals between subduction zone quakes vary from 1,000 years to 200 years.

With an interval of 200 to 1000 years means one of two things. Were overdue for the next subduction quake, or we still have a bit of time to go.

The big unknown factor here is what kind of activity, if any, was there before the major subduction quakes?

Along the Oregon coast, geologists Curt D. Peterson and Mark E. Darienzo turned up matching evidence for past huge earthquakes and tsunamis. They've detected about 10 earthquakes in the past 5,000 years. Gary A. Carver, a geology professor at Humboldt State University, also found similar sites along the Northern California coast.

See the below link for article. Take Care…Don in creepy town.

• Oregon Subduction Quakes