Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Force of Nature

There's nothing like the force of a largemouth bass hitting your feeble little fishing line. I keep the drag on light, and hope to tire it out before it breaks my line. When I'm camping with a bunch of fish-hungry teenagers, we'll eat the bass. But I remember once on Georgian Bay, when I caught a huge fish. I was ready to fight it, when the darn thing zoomed right under my canoe, snagged my line, and lept like a daemon, breaking the line. I always considered Georgian Bay to be a place of large mysteries.

Today, I'm celebrating another Georgian Bay mystery, with an earthquake right where I expect a seismicity pattern will fill in.

You can read all about this earthquake on the SOSN website. I had a lot of fun helping to put together this seismic network, but that's another story. This 'big fish' is part of a pattern that is filling in for that area.

It's rather amazing that stable patterns didn't fill in for the Hamilton and Lake Ontario regions until we had good seismic monitoring for 15 years. The Bruce area was always considered totally devoid of seismic fish, because nobody was monitoring, and now they are getting caught. Over the next few years, I expect a full Hamilton pattern developing there, which means that it is a water-activated fracture zone on a major Precambrian megathrust, much like Hamilton and Prince Edward County.

2 comments:

Steve Watson said...

Harold,

I'm guessing I know the name of the "large utility", which was the same one my father worked at for 33 years, as a research engineer.

I have a slight connection to the subject of this post: I once had a summer student job in the design section for Bruce B (at Head Office) -- and one assignment I had was about seismic qualification for some equipment on the plant floor. As part of that, we got a demo of the shaker table at the Research Division.

So: do we have to worry about Bruce NGS cracking open and melting down? ;-)

Harold Asmis said...

Hey, I'm not saying anything bad about Bruce Power, or the OPG deep thing they want to build! Because they would kill me.... :) (or spit at me, or call me names, or something..)

I'm just tiptoeing around the whole issue, and throwing in the little obvious facts. Stay tuned for more posts!