This is an online event. The webinar will open at 11:30AM with opening remarks beginning around 11:45AM

Abstract

Vancouver Island owes much of its physical beauty to its location along a major plate boundary, the Cascadia subduction zone. Unfortunately, this comes at a price: the ever-present threat posed by earthquakes and secondary hazards like tsunamis, landslides, and liquefaction. This lecture will introduce what we know about the Cascadia megathrust fault, responsible for great earthquakes (up to magnitude 9) every few hundred years, but also deep earthquakes in the subducting Juan de Fuca plate and shallow earthquakes in the overriding North American crust, which though smaller in magnitude are both more frequent and potentially very damaging locally. Though such earthquakes are inevitable, we’ll discuss what we can do to mitigate the worst of their impacts both at a household and community level.

Speaker

As Canada Research Chair in Geophysics, Dr. Edwin Nissen seeks to better understand earthquake behaviour within and around British Columbia. He and his research team are using innovative measurements from the fields of earthquake geodesy (the study of how the Earth deforms during and between earthquakes) and tectonic geomorphology (the study of how the Earth’s surface topography evolves over many earthquake cycles). Given that geologists anticipate that a massive earthquake could strike British Columbia at any time, Nissen’s findings could provide the knowledge we need to be better prepared.