There’s a reason the Tintina Fault in Canada has been largely ignored until now. It hasn’t done anything dramatic for about 12,000 years. No major quakes, no real headlines—just the occasional tremor in an otherwise unbothered stretch of forested Yukon. However, new research suggests it might be time to reconsider.
A study published on July 15th in Geophysical Research Letters found that the Tintina Fault has been accumulating tension beneath the surface for the past few thousand years, with enough built-up energy to fuel a magnitude 7.5 earthquake potentially. That’s the kind of event that could level parts of Dawson City, disrupt mining operations, and trigger severe landslides in a region that’s mostly not expecting it.
“Major ancient faults like that can remain as weak zones in the Earth’s crust and then focus ongoing tectonic strain,” said geoscientist Theron Finley, who led the study while earning his doctorate at the University of Victoria, when he spoke to Live Science.
Is Canada About to Have a Massive Earthquake? Maybe.
Using high-resolution satellite imagery and lidar—which can map the ground beneath dense forests—Finley and his team looked for telltale surface features left behind by previous quakes. Fault scarps, for instance, are subtle shifts in terrain where the ground lifted or dropped during a past rupture. These are often just a few meters high but can stretch for hundreds of kilometers. The team also used glacial markings to help date these disruptions.
What they found was unsettling: over the last 2.6 million years, the fault moved more than 3,000 feet. Even in the previous 136,000 years, there was still 250 feet of movement. That likely took hundreds of earthquakes to build up. More importantly, the team estimates the fault has accumulated around 20 feet of unreleased strain. Most large quakes happen after about 10 to 30 feet of buildup. In other words, the clock might be ticking.
Finley says it’s impossible to know whether that strain will be released tomorrow or 3,000 years from now, but the data shows it’s within the rupture zone. “We don’t know when it will happen,” he said, “but we now know it can happen.”
For a region that hasn’t seen a surface-rupturing earthquake since the last ice age, that’s no minor update. Whether it’s decades away or much further out, the Tintina Fault just earned its place on Canada’s seismic watchlist.
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