Residents may not feel it, but Western Canada's Vancouver Island is moving west in what seismologists call a tremor-and-slip event.
The phenomenon is equal to a magnitude 6.5 to 6.7 earthquake -- but instead of 10 seconds, it happens over two weeks.
"We think that it's one of these events that will trigger the big mega-thrust earthquake," seismologist John Cassidy of the Pacific Geoscience Center said on Tuesday. "We just don't know which one of these events will trigger the giant earthquake."
More sensitive global satellite technology led to the discovery that every 14 months Vancouver Island moved toward Japan by about 5mm. They connected that movement with a seismic grinding of the ocean plates and discovered the tremor-and-slip event.
"This new information is allowing us to better understand where these earthquakes occur, and how large they can be, and how the ground will shake," he said.
He conceded they will likely never be able to accurately predict when and exactly where a quake would happen.
Experts at the Pacific Geoscience Center, a federal government agency on Vancouver Island, are conferring with seismologists around the world on the event.
Cassidy said they're trying to make some connections between the devastating Indonesian earthquake last year and the tremor. But he said there was only one seismic station, run by the Japanese, operating near Indonesia at the time.
"We're trying to get the data from that station to see if there was anything before that giant earthquake in December," he said.
The Cascadia subduction zone runs beneath the waters off Canada's western coast and large earthquakes of a magnitude 9 or more occur every 500 years, on average. The last major quake was Jan. 26, 1700. A similar subduction zone -- where an ocean plate pushes beneath a continent -- runs along Indonesia.
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