Earthquake!
We just had a 5.1 earthquake here in BC (fortunately it didn't do much damage; sadly I didn't get to feel it). This has sparked a lot of general questions on social media about quakes. As a science journalist who has written about earthquakes before, I thought I’d write up a quick FAQ here. This is just the result of my quick trawl through peer reviewed research and government websites; I'm not an expert, but I do a better job than AI, I like to think. :) How many quakes do we normally get? It is estimated that there are 500,000 detectable earthquakes in the world each year. 100,000 of those can be felt, and 100 of them cause damage. ( USGS ) In BC, there are several thousand quakes a year, of which about 50 are felt. A damage-causing quake happens on average once in BC every decade. ( BC govt ) What’s the risk of a big one’ in BC? The Cascadia fault line, where the ocean dives under the North American continent, will, one day, cause a very big qua...