Reading: Part of the Earth is tearing apart in a ‘train wreck’ event

Part of the Earth is tearing apart in a ‘train wreck’ event

Last updated: 2025/11/17 at 12:28 PM

News Room Published 17 November 2025

The Earth feels rock solid – after all, it has been around for around for 4.5 billion years. But through various studies we know that the surface of the Earth is moving due to its continental plates. This often causes activity around subduction zones, and a new study may have captured the first glimpse of a ‘death’ process off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. (Picture: Getty Images)

Simply put, a subduction zone is a region where one tectonic plate slides beneath another at a converging plate boundary. They are located in oceanic basins, and an oceanic plate can converge under either another oceanic plate or a continental plate. In this instance, the subduction zone in question is where the Juan de Fuca and Explore plates are currently subducting under the North American plate. (Picture: Getty Images)

Lead author Dr Brandon Shuck said: ‘Getting a subduction zone started is like trying to push a train uphill – it takes a huge effort. But once it’s moving, it’s like the train is racing downhill, impossible to stop. Ending it requires something dramatic – basically, a train wreck.’ Dr Shuck and his team used a combination of seismic reflection imaging, an ultrasound of the Earth’s subsurface, and detailed earthquake records to capture the process. (Picture: Getty Images)

The high tech expedition used a 15 kilometer long ‘streamer’ of listening devices to record the echoes of sound waves. Using this data, the researchers constructed a detailed map of the faults and fractures along this subduction deep beneath the ocean floor. They found that the plates don’t collapse all at once, but instead break off piece by piece in a process known as ‘episodic’ or ‘piecewise’ termination. Dr Shuck explains: ‘So instead of a big train wreck, it’s like watching a train slowly derail, one car at a time.’ (Picture: Getty Images)

The researchers found massive tears along the Juan de Fuca plate, but the big reveal was a huge break where the plate dropped roughly 5 kilometers. This has not torn off completely but it’s close – although in a geological sense it will take several million years for any of these pieces to break away. However, the team has confirmed that some sections are active while others are quiet, likely due to a piece breaking off and the rocks no longer being stuck together, but these episodes may gradually shut down an entire subduction system. (Picture: Getty Images)

Dr Shuck said: ‘There’s a very large fault that’s actively breaking the [subducting] plate. It’s not 100% torn off yet, but it’s close. Once a piece has completely broken off, it no longer produces earthquakes because the rocks aren’t stuck together anymore.’ And that missing gap of seismicity is a telltale sign that part of the plate has already detached and the gap is growing slowly over time. (Picture: Getty Images)

The researchers say that a detailed look at this episodic termination can help solve other geologic mysteries in other parts of the world. Near Baja California lie fragments of ancient plates, or microplates, which are tell-tale remnants of dying subduction zones. Researchers previously knew these fragments must be evidence of dying subduction zones. The mechanism that created them was unclear but now they have the missing piece – that subduction zones don’t collapse in a single catastrophic event but unravel step by step, leaving behind microplates as geological evidence. (Picture: Getty Images)

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