Twenty five years and five days ago, the earth shook in Seattle. Although the Big One didn’t hit that day, I doubt I will forget the seconds following 10:54 a.m. on that not-so-tranquil Wednesday, February 28, 2001. I had just picked up Audubon magazine at the University Bookstore (sadly no longer in existence) when the shaking began. It started slowly and gently, as if a large truck was passing on University Way. As the seconds seemed to stretch longer and longer, however, the shaking became a rumbling and concrete walls, bookshelves, and windows swayed and rattled.

Despite the years of training, I had as a child in Seattle, where we were all taught to crawl under our desks during an earthquake, I didn’t get under a doorway or heavy desk. Instead, I stood still, mesmerized by the undulating, out-of-focus structure. I don’t know why I didn’t move, but I had no fear that anything would collapse. Maybe I was just being naïve. I had been through a few small tremors, and this was certainly the biggest one I had felt, but it just seemed that all would be okay.

An employee at a cash register broke my reverie when she yelled and ran and leapt into a co-worker’s arms. As the shaking continued, I noticed that other people were quickly moving toward the doors. I followed, but at a slow pace, more caught up in the realization that I was watching one of the greatest ideas in science, the theory of plate tectonics, come to life, than I was by getting out of what appeared to be a pretty safe building.

When I finally made it outside, I discovered that standing still was not an option; either my legs were wobbling or the ground continued to shake. Stillness eventually returned and I began to turn my mind back to geology and wondering where the quake had hit and how big it was. Such is the mind of a geodork.

I suspected that I had felt a Benioff zone (deep) quake, which is one of the more common manifestations of plate tectonics, at least in the Pacific Northwest. In the case of the Nisqually, two plates play central roles, the small Juan de Fuca, and the massive continent of North America. During the past 20 to 30 million years, the leading edge of the denser Juan de Fuca has slid under, or subducted, the lighter North American Plate. The Juan de Fuca’s descending tongue now rests between 20 and 50 miles underground, directly beneath Puget Sound.

As the plate dives deeper, it slowly bends and becomes much hotter, which creates two problems for us at the surface. The first is that bending stretches the plate. The second problem occurs because heat drives water out of minerals and shrinks the plate. This bending and contraction of the Juan de Fuca deep under Puget Sound is one cause of the earthquakes we feel in Seattle. Along with producing the Nisqually quake, the Benioff zone generated the two other quakes that hit Puget Sound in the 1900s, a 7.1 magnitude event on April 13, 1949, and a 6.5 magnitude tremor on April 29, 1965.

When I think back to February 28, one of the aspects of the earthquake that stands out was how slowly time seemed to progress. I did not expect the shaking to both increase in scale and to continue for such a long time. Despite what the reports said, I am sure that I felt vibrations for several minutes and not just 45 seconds, which is how long the geologists say the quake lasted. The intersection between geologic and human time was both exciting and scary.

This was most evident to me the week following the Nisqually earthquake, when Marjorie and I traveled to El Salvador to see friends. We had been planning the trip for months and El Salvador’s January 13, 7.6 magnitude and February 13, 6.6 magnitude earthquakes gave us a firsthand chance to see the destruction. While damage, such as cracked walls and rubble piles, was evident across the capital of San Salvador, we did not see true devastation until we went out into the countryside.

At San Agostin, a dot of a town in the foothills of one of El Salvador’s many volcanoes, I felt like a voyeur, because only the ground floor remained in most houses. A few had walls standing but even these had wood supports propping them up. Electrical boxes and bare bulbs hung from trees. At what was left of the school, people stood in line, waiting to receive food from aid workers. It appeared that many were living in a tent village, set up in the school grounds.

We also saw Santa Tecla, a middle class suburb of San Salvador that was annihilated by a landslide. During the January quake a ridge above town collapsed, sending a wall of soil and rock down and over several blocks of two-story, cinder block houses. The debris path through Santa Tecla was two blocks wide and a half mile long. At least 700 people died in the landslide. The final number will probably never be known because people are still buried in the rubble. No one was allowed to return and live in neighborhood below the landslide; a tent city outside the cordoned-off zone housed over 2,100 people.

As I stood below the landslide ridge, I thought about how much we take for granted in Seattle and was struck by how little damage had happened. El Salvador was the first place where I had ever witnessed geology overprinted by such a deadly human face. The death and destruction were sobering, and I am less eager to revel in the process of natural disasters than previously, but still, this is the way I think the world should work.

I like that I live in an area of active geology. I like knowing that the potential exists for a natural cataclysm right under my feet. This does not mean that I advocate another quake or that I look forward to the destruction that will follow. As always, Seattle’s active geology starkly reminds us that nature bats last, even in the environment that we think we tamed the most, the urban zone.

Word of the Week - Juan de Fuca - In 1596, Greek mariner Apostolos Valerianos told English merchant Michael Lok that he had sailed north from Mexico to a “broad Inlet of Sea” between 47 and 48 degrees latitude. Valerianos, who is better known as Juan de Fuca, sailed east for more than twenty days, finding a productive land and valuable minerals. He thought he had discovered the Straits of Anian, or the legendary Northwest Passage. He didn’t, but his name remains; most historians doubt that Juan de Fuca ever made it to his eponymous strait.

March 24, 2026 - MOHAI - Book launch for Seattle’s Lock and Ship Canal: A History and Guide Book - I will be speaking with my co-author and friend Jennifer Ott about our new book. Well, actually it’s an edited reissue—better than ever—of our previous book about the locks. Here’s info on attending.

March 26, 2026 - Eastside Audubon Society - Redmond Senior and Community Center - I’ll be talking about my book Wild in Seattle. Here’s some info.

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