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Earthquakes in the past few thousand years have left signs of land-level change, tsunamis, and shaking along the Pacific coast at the Cascadia subduction zone. Sudden lowering of land accounts for many of the buried marsh and forest soils at estuaries between southern British Columbia and northern California. Sand layers on some of these soils imply that tsunamis were triggered by some of the events that lowered the land. Liquefaction features show that inland shaking accompanied sudden coastal subsidence at the Washington-Oregon border about 300 years ago. The combined evidence for subsidence, tsunamis, and shaking shows that earthquakes of magnitude 8 or larger have occurred on the boundary between the overriding North America plate and the downgoing Juan de Fuca and Gorda plates. Intervals between the earthquakes are poorly known because of uncertainties about the number and ages of the earthquakes. Current estimates for individual intervals at specific coastal sites range from a few centuries to about one thousand years.

A landslide located on the Quesnel River in British Columbia, Canada is used as a case study to demonstrate the utility of a multi-geophysical approach to subsurface mapping of unstable slopes. Ground penetrating radar (GPR), direct current (DC) resistivity and seismic reflection and refraction surveys were conducted over the landslide and adjacent terrain. Geophysical data were interpreted based on stratigraphic and geomorphologic observations, including the use of digital terrain models (DTMs), and then integrated into a 3-dimensional model. GPR surveys yielded high-resolution data that were correlated with stratigraphic units to a maximum depth of 25 m. DC electrical resistivity offered limited data on specific units but was effective for resolving stratigraphic relationships between units to a maximum depth of 40 m. Seismic surveys were primarily used to obtain unit boundaries up to a depth of >80 m. Surfaces of rupture and separation were successfully identified by GPR and DC electrical resistivity techniques.

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