M6.3 Earthquake Strikes off Oregon Coast

A 6.3-magnitude earthquake struck Thursday off the Oregon coast, but it didn’t generate a tsunami or cause any damage or injuries, authorities said.

The epicenter of the quake, which hit just after 8 a.m., was located about 150 miles from land at a depth of 7 miles in the Pacific Ocean.

The quake was caused by slipping along an offshore fault called the Blanco Fracture Zone and has nothing to do with the more well-known Cascadia fault, which is believed to be overdue for a major earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, said Paul Bodin, manager of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network at the University of Washington.

The event is also unrelated to a cluster of “episodic slips” along the Cascadia tectonic plate boundary that have been releasing energy across the coastal Pacific Northwest over the past week to 10 days, he said.

Those slips are not felt by humans but have been picked up by monitoring devices around the Olympic Peninsula in northwest Washington state and also stretching from Eugene to the Siskiyou Mountains along the Oregon-California border, according to the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.

The slips along the Cascadia relented two days ago after a fairly active week, Bodin said.

Topics Catastrophe Natural Disasters Oregon Earthquake