2001 Nisqually earthquake
earthquake in Washington, USA in March 2001
The 2001 Nisqually earthquake occurred at 10:54:32 local time on February 28, 2001, and lasted nearly a minute. The intraslab earthquake had a moment magnitude of 6.8 and a maximum Mercalli intensity of VIII (Severe). The epicenter was in the southern Puget Sound, northeast of Olympia, but the shock was felt in Oregon, British Columbia, eastern Washington, and Idaho. This was the most recent of several large earthquakes that occurred in the Puget Sound region over a 52-year period and caused property damage valued at $1–4 billion. One person died of a heart attack and several hundred were injured.
Tectonic setting
The Puget Sound area is prone to deep earthquakes due to the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate's subduction under the North American plate at 3.5 to 4.5 cm a year as part of the Cascadia subduction zone. Three types of earthquake are observed in the area: rare megathrust events, such as the 1700 Cascadia earthquake, shallow events within the North American plate and deeper intraslab events within the Juan de Fuca plate as it sinks into the mantle. The third type of earthquake is the one that has led to the greatest amount of damage. Significant intraslab earthquakes occurred in the same general region on April 29, 1965 (magnitude 6.7, depth 59 km (37 mi)), and April 13, 1949 (magnitude 6.7, depth 50 km (31 mi)).
Earthquake
The earthquake was an intraslab event within the Juan de Fuca plate.
“2001 Nisqually earthquake” enters the record as earthquake in Washington, USA in March 2001. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Nisqually, earthquake and Washington can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3510577. The Library of Congress control number is sh2003004694. Authority coordinates are 47.150, -122.730. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2001, 1700, 1965 and 1949.
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This entry incorporates text from “2001 Nisqually earthquake” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.