The location of the 4.2-magnitude earthquake off the northern coast of Vancouver Island- Credit: United States Geological Survey
A 4.2-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of northern Vancouver Island Sunday morning.
The first tremor occurred at 10:54 a.m., around 10 minutes later a 4.4-magnitude earthquake struck in the same area.
The epicentre for both quakes was 159 kilometres west of Port Hardy, at a depth of 10 kilometres.
Seismologist John Cassidy from Natural Resources Canada says it’s just one of a series of earthquakes that strike in the same area regularly. They do not expect it to have been felt on the Island.
“It is a very active region, it’s a part of the plate margin, the region between the Pacific plate and North American plate where we see hundreds of earthquakes each year,” he said. “The earthquake waves tend to lose quite a bit of energy as they travel from the oceanic plates onto the continental plate, on-to Vancouver Island.”
A 6.8-magnitude earthquake was recorded back in 1991 along the same offshore-fault.
Julian Kolsut
