Pacific Northwest susceptible to undersea quake?

At a magnitude of 8.9, the earthquake in Japan was more than 700 times stronger than last year's devastating quake in Haiti, and about 2,000 times stronger than the 1994 Northridge earthquake in California. CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric spoke to Dr. Lucy Jones, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, about the earthquake.

Couric: How surprised were scientists by the magnitude of this earthquake?

Jones: A mixed bag. It is a plate boundary, we know that these things happen. But this is the largest earthquake in the last 140 years around Japan. Some of the maps have said that they thought that the northern part would never have such a large earthquake. Obviously that's not the case.

Couric: How does this tsunami compare to the one that struck Thailand and Indonesia back in 2004?

Jones: This tsunami is a bit smaller than the Indian Ocean tsunami because the earthquake is a bit smaller. I mean, a tsunami happens because you have a massive earthquake on a huge fault that moves a large part of the sea floor up - and the water that used to be there has to go somewhere else.

Couric: Could this type of undersea earthquake happen along the U. S. coastline?

Jones: There are two places in the United States, where we have a similar type of fault that will also produce a big earthquake and a big tsunami. One is the Aluetian arc around Alaska. And the other much more dangerously is the pacific northwest. There's one of these types of faults running all the way from Cape Mendicino in the south, to the island of Victoria, in British Colombia in the north.

Couric: What can scientists hope to learn from this earthquake and tsunami?

Jones: This is going to be the best recorded earthquake ever. The japanese have spectacular instrumentation and I think we're going to learn a lot more about the fundamental nature of earthquakes. We're also going to be learning a lot about how buildings behave in these very largest events and especially cities of Seattle and Portland. I hope we're looking very, very carefully at how the Japanese buildings behaved.