Vancouver Island shaken by earthquake
Posted Aug 4, 2013 8:27 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
An early morning earthquake has rattled Vancouver Island.
Earthquakes Canada is a reporting a magnitude 5.5 earthquake struck roughly 100 km south of Port Hardy at around 6:20. It was lightly felt across northern Vancouver Island in Port Alice, Port McNeill, Tahsis, Sointula and Alert Bay.
John Cassidy, an earthquake seismologist with Natural Resources Canada says there are no reports of damage and a tsunami isn’t expected. “This one was not that deep, it was about within 10 km of the surface. We do see much deeper earthquakes here on the South Coast, down to 60 or 70 km.”
He says today’s earthquake is not an aftershock linked to the magnitude 7.7 quake that shook Haida Gwaii in October. “This is a separate system from where the earthquake occurred off of Haida Gwaii in October. We’re still seeing a lot of aftershocks, we’re seeing many aftershocks each day off of Haida Gwaii from that earthquake. Today’s event is along the Nootka fault zone, which is a very active region of seismicity and we’ve seen much larger earthquakes along this particular fault.”
He says a magnitude 6.3 earthquake that struck the Nootka fault zone in September 2011.
