News

Speaker:

Alan Ruffmann
President Geomarine Associates Ltd., Halifax.
Honourary Research Associate, Dept. of Earth Sciences, Dalhousie University

Monday, October 6th, 2014
7:30pm
Museum of Natural History, 1747 Summer St., Halifax.

We do not generally think of Atlantic Canada as a seismically-active region and few in the audience will have felt a local seismic event. Yet Canada's most tragic known historical earthquake (magnitude 7.2) occurred on November 18, 1929 about 265 km south of the Burin Peninsula of Newfoundland; the resultant tsunami killed 28 residents in the nearby coastal communities. The three largest earthquakes known in eastern North America all took place at an offshore epicentre in 1755, 1929 and 1933 possibly all at an epicentre located close to the edge of the 'continental shelf', or at what is referred to as the 'shelf break'. The "Maremoto de Lisboa" was observed in NE Newfoundland on November 1, 1755. Other home-grown more modest tsunamis are known locally in 1843, 1848 1864, perhaps in 1914 and 1926.

Alan Ruffman will discuss and illustrate his 30 years of research into Atlantic historic seismicity and he will lay out the case for a newly-defined seismic source zone off southwestern Nova Scotia. He will show how a brief plagiarized March 18, 1774 Halifax newspaper account has lead back to defining an uncatalogued tragic Gulfo de Cádiz tsunamigenic earthquake in July of 1773 and he will describe the scientific serendipity that has now allowed a New Year's Eve 1882, widely-reported, felt earthquake, in Maine, N.B. and N.S., to be reclassified as a low-level meteor 'airburst' - not as a tectonic earthquake.

http://nsis.chebucto.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Oct_6_2014_Ruffman.pdf

All are welcome to attend!                            

To learn more about the Institute’s events, please take a look at the NSIS brochure:
http://nsis.chebucto.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/NSIS_brochure_2014-2015.pdf

The Nova Scotian Institute of Science: Promoting Science in Nova Scotia since 1862.
http://nsis.chebucto.org/

For further information, please contact NSIS President Patrick Ryall at: nsis@chebucto.ns.ca