Oregon and Washington states should be much more dangerous places to live. Located above a zone where the Pacific oceanic crust is sliding underneath the North American continent, the states should experience regular devastating earthquakes. That they don’t, it seems, is down to the lubricating effect of the Yellowstone plume.
On the downside, this area of upwelling hot rock feeds the largest and potentially most dangerous volcanic system in North America.
Richard Allen of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues used seismic surveys to reconstruct the structure of the Juan de Fuca plate, a small chunk of Pacific oceanic…
