The quake-maker you've never heard of: Cascadia

By Michael Martinez, Stephanie Elam, and Rosalina Nieves, CNN

Updated 10:30 AM ET, Sat February 13, 2016 | Video Source: CNN

(CNN)Mother Earth slowly reveals her secrets, and this time, it's a fault line deep in the belly of the planet.

Its name is a whopper: The Cascadia subduction zone.

Its gargantuan size and potential power amaze earthquake experts, who say it could cause the worst natural disaster in the history of North America -- if it ruptures entirely.

This quake-maker sits at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, where the seabed meets the North American tectonic plate. In all, it stretches 700 miles along the Pacific Northwest, from British Columbia's Vancouver Island to Washington to Oregon to northern California's Cape Mendocino.

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