Revisit of the Great Toronto Earthquake - Part 1

 This is physics.  Everything is expressed as probabilities.  The Hamilton Fault, near Toronto, is as good a fault as anything in North America.  The only difference is that it has a strain rate 10 times less than anything in California, but the rock is 10 times stiffer.  The energy rates are the same.

The big California math error of 1906, is that faults are the generator of earthquake energy.  This is wrong.  Faults are the weakest zones in the rock mass, and strain accumulates with them, not stress.  The strain energy is coming from the surrounding rock.  

Thus, faults don't have anything to do with seismic hazard, that is whether you are near one or not.  Observing the fault gives you nothing on the next earthquake.  When an earthquake blows, the stress on the fault goes to zero, and the region 'arches' around the fault.  These 'holes' stay around for a long time.

In the East, we have huge masses of granite, and many old faults.  They have nothing to do with seismic hazard.  However, we have 'mechanisms' that may narrow down the location of an earthquake in the future.  

Our Hamilton fault was created a billion years ago when we had the equivalent of the Himalayas right on top of Toronto.  The formational faults then 'back-slid' when the mountains were ground off by erosion for hundreds of millions of years.  You can see all this in the deep seismic reflection surveys.  We have many of these fault systems, such as the Grenville Front, etc.  They are only dangerous when fed with lots of water.

All of this is ignored for major projects like nuclear waste disposal and nuclear plants.  Nevertheless, our 'earthquake zones' are drains for surface water, percolating down and dissolving quartz hard points, keeping everything still.  This is called 'stress corrosion'.

Thus, my earthquake scenario has an M7 (equivalent to New Madrid) along the Hamilton fault.  It is a perfectly good mechanism at about 1 in 10,000 per year.  Probably, 1 in 1000.  You don't really care about that, unless you are building 1000 nuclear plants for AI data centres.

-- to be continued with Day One