Sunday, December 12, 2010

Learning Something New...Every Day (Well Almost)

From the well-known geoblog "Highly Allochthonous", comes a post (from a few months ago) about a recent 5.0 earthquake in eastern Canada.

Scrolling through the post, I learned that the St. Lawrence River follows a small graben system, related to a failed rift-system related to the rifting of the supercontinent Rodinia and the opening of the Iapetus Ocean, about 1 billion years ago.

Similar to the New Madrid Fault System along the Mississippi River, crustal weaknesses due to the old breaks make the area susceptible to earthquakes.

[When time permits, I plan to write a bit more about this newly discovered (from my perspective) geologic feature.]

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