Significant Canadian Earthquakes of the Period 1600-2006

Abstract

Raising earthquake awareness is an important goal of seismological research. In this respect, the effect of past local earthquakes is an excellent means to raise the local population's awareness. For this reason, Natural Resources Canada has put numerous photographic examples of impacts of local earthquakes on its Web sites (see, for example, http://www.earthquakescanada.ca). The information the site contains is used in the production of various publications and Web pages and is an important source of information for the public. Another much-used public awareness tool is the Atlas of Canada, formerly on paper but now online, which provides authoritative, current, and accessible geographic information products. The atlas facilitates the integration and analysis of diverse data in order to increase overall knowledge about Canada. One much-consulted component of the Web-based atlas (http://www.atlas.gc.ca) is the natural hazards maps (floods, forest fires, landslides, volcanoes, avalanches, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, and earthquakes). The information is used by the public as well as by emergency organizations that seek information on the threats faced by their communities. Before 2007, the Atlas of Canada provided very limited information on earthquake activity in Canada. Thirty earthquakes were briefly described in a nonsystematic manner that did not truly reflect the distribution of earthquakes across the territory or the recent advances in descriptions of historical earthquakes. To update the Atlas of Canada pages on earthquakes, the authors decided to create a list that would include up-to-date information on significant earthquakes in Canada. The authors also decided to publish the results and methodology in a Geological Survey of Canada Open File Report (Lamontagne et al. 2007) as a means of properly documenting each earthquake and ensuring peer review by Geological Survey of Canada seismologists. The new list could also update other existing sites including the EarthquakesCanada Web site. This paper details how the …