Large earthquake could strike in Manitoba or Saskatchewan

Eastern Ontario and Quebec and the West Coast aren’t the only parts of Canada that have an earthquake risk. Research shows that while the probability is quite low, Saskatchewan and Manitoba also have some risk of experiencing a large quake, said Dr. John Adams of the Geological Survey of Canada.Adams spoke at the Canadian Seismic Research Network’s Workshop on Seismic Hazards and Microzonation in Toronto on Jan. 13.”There are some earthquakes in the middle of Canada,” he said. “We see earthquakes in Saskatchewan relatively often, maybe five times a year. We had a Magnitude-5.3 earthquake there in 1909. “We don’t think anywhere in Canada is safe from earthquakes. We just think the probabilities are low [in central Canada].”Adams pointed to research from Australia that analyzed “hundreds of thousands of years of fault scars across the continent of Australia.”The conclusion of that research is that earthquakes in the middle of continents could be as large as Magnitude 7.2, he said. “That means that there is some very low probability that an earthquake of that size could occur in Manitoba or Saskatchewan. The risk is so much lower than Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa or Toronto, but it isn’t zero.”