The Canadian Press

VANCOUVER, B.C. — A new study says the next major earthquake to hit the Pacific Northwest could strike below Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula.

Professor Andy Calvert of Simon Fraser University, the lead author of the study, says it shows the fault line between two tectonic plates in the Pacific Northwest is seven kilometers (4.3 miles) deeper than originally believed.

He says the fault line underneath Washington state is actually 27 to 42 kilometers, not 25 to 35 kilometres as previously believed. A kilometer is 0.62 mile.

Calvert and his team came to the conclusion by looking at how long it took seismic waves to spread throughout the Earth.

The findings were published recently in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Questions about the possibility of an earthquake on the West Coast have been on the rise since early March, when a magnitude-9 earthquake and a subsequent tsunami killed thousands of people in Japan and resulted in a tsunami alert along the British Columbia coast.