Underwater landslides south of Nova Scotia could spawn tsunami: study
Posted Nov 20, 2019 10:54:17 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Could Nova Scotia one day find itself in the path of a tsunami? It's a risk outlined in a new research paper published in geology.
According to the study, huge submarine landslides are happening on the Scotian Slope south of our province at a rate that's 10 times higher than first thought. It's still a large time scale with researchers saying that higher rate means once every one thousand years instead of every ten thousand.
Dr. Calvin Campbell with the Geological Survey of Canada telling NEWS 95.7, not every underwater landslide would cause a tsunami.
“You need to have a lot of vertical – what we call vertical offset of the water column so it has to be a big underwater landslide, and it has to move quickly enough that it causes this offset,” explains Campbell. “The sort of increase in recurrence, or frequency that we note in the paper is not necessarily a one to one relationship with an increase in the probability of a tsunami.”
Campbell says it would still take a particularly large landslide to generate a tsunami.
“I'm not overly concerned, in terms of our science, we're always trying to refine, and get better ideas on how these processes work,” says Campbell. “I think there's probably more significant things that we should be worrying about in terms of natural hazards that might happen.”
Campbell says his team discovered four submarine landslides on the scale of the 1929 Grand Banks earthquake that killed 28 people on Newfoundland's Burin Peninsula.
