Earthquake hazards might be a threat to Atlantic Canada

Saturday, October 11, 2014, 4:02 PM -

Hurricanes are a familiar concern in eastern Canada, but at a recent lecture by the Nova Scotia Institute of Science, earthquakes were a topic of much discussion.

Alan Ruffmann, honorary research associate at Dalhousie University's department of earth sciences, presented his case for a newly-defined seismic zone off the coast of Southwestern Nova Scotia. The term "seismic zone" is often used by seismologists to define areas where seismicity (the frequency of earthquakes in a specific region) is fairly consistent.

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The largest earthquake to ever strike Atlantic Canada occurred off the south coast of Newfoundland in 1929. At a magnitude of 7.2, it triggered a tsunami and killed 28 people.

Ruffmann referred to newspaper clippings that predate the use of instruments recording earthquakes in Nova Scotia, which have been in use for less than 100 years. After a recent outbreak of 10 to 12 small earthquakes along the edge of the shelf in South West Nova Scotia, Ruffman is calling for the installation of a seismograph.

“This is not climate change. This is the regular sort of a process that occurs when you melt ice after an ice age and the ice has been gone in Nova Scotia and Quebec and New Brunswick for at least 10 to 15,00o years," Ruffmann said in an interview with The Weather Network's Nathan Coleman.

"But the rebound, the elastic response to the bending of the crust is still slowly working itself out and it may be related to that – we don’t know,” he added.

According to Ruffmann, there's no indication that a large earthquake will occur again. But Coleman notes that there were no predetermined signs for the earthquake that struck in 1929.