07/30/2025

Scientists Believe a Major Earthquake Fault Line is Awaking

The fault line is located in Canada’s Yukon Territory

High up in Canada's Yukon Territory, a seismic gun is being cocked and aimed at the little community of Dawson City—population 1,600. If a new study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is correct, that town or one of many others in the region could be rocked by a major earthquake pretty much at any moment. The source of the danger is a 1,000 km (620 mi) formation known as the Tintina fault that cuts northwest across the Yukon and terminates in Alaska. It has been mostly still for the past 12,000 years but appears to be getting ready to lurch to life.

"Over the past couple of decades there have been a few small earthquakes of magnitude 3 to 4 detected along the Tintina Fault, but nothing to suggest it is capable of large ruptures," said Theron Finley, a recent PhD graduate at Canada's University of Victoria and the lead author of the study, in a statement. That's not the full story, though, Finley said. What the last few decades suggest and what the geological record now shows are two different things—and according to the paper, Tintina is a lot more menacing than it seems.

What caught the interest of Finley and his colleagues is a 130-km (80 mi) segment of the fault that runs near Dawson City, with surface features suggesting that numerous large earthquakes occurred in relatively recent geological history—during the Quaternary Period, which runs from 2.6 million years ago to the present. To get a better understanding, the researchers used an existing library of high-resolution imagery from airplanes, satellites, and drones, some of them captured by lidar, which uses pulsed laser emissions to produce 3D maps of the surface. This allowed them to study that stretch of the fault in unprecedented detail—and find a number of geological secrets hiding in plain sight.

Please select this link to read the complete article from TIME.