Scientists Are Solving the Mystery Behind Earthquake That Lasted for 32 Years!

In 1861, the slow quake, which was the longest ever recorded, ended in horror. Experts are frantically searching for modern-day equivalents of this earthquake that lasted for 32 years!

Slow earthquakes have only been detected in the Pacific Northwest of North America and the Nankai area off the coast of Japan since the late 1990s. Because of their slow energy release, they produce little surface movements, and they weren't detected until GPS technology had advanced sufficiently to track such minute changes.

The more areas geologists have investigated since then, the more slow earthquakes they've discovered, from New Zealand's beaches to Costa Rica and even Alaska. "We find aseismic slip everywhere," says Lucile Bruhat, a geophysicist at Paris' Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS).

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Researchers may miscalculate where the stress is on a fault-and how large a quake that fault may possibly produce-if slow-slip motion is overlooked. "We can better characterize the magnitude of an earthquake that can occur once we properly characterize the locked region," Furlong adds.

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