Earthquakes in Canada: search 100,000 events since 1985

You want to know how often the ground shakes near you, find the largest earthquakes recorded in a province, or count events by year. Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) publishes the earthquakes located by Earthquakes Canada as open data. Its CSV file is a live table on CanQuery, so you can search, sort, filter and chart more than 100,000 events in the browser.

At a glance
Publisher	Natural Resources Canada (Earthquakes Canada)
What it lists	One row per located earthquake: time, position, depth, magnitude and nearest place
Time span of the CSV	January 1, 1985 to December 31, 2019: 101,365 events
Area	Canada and nearby areas, including parts of Alaska and Washington State
On CanQuery	A live table in English and in French, with search, filters, charts and CSV export of up to 10,000 rows
After 2019	Earthquakes Canada's own search covers recent and current events

The dataset is titled Earthquakes in Canada 2010-2019, but its CSV files hold the full archive from 1985: the 2010s account for 44,561 of the rows.

Find earthquakes in the table

1. Open the earthquake table in CanQuery. Each row is one event.
2. Sort the magnitude column from largest to smallest to see the strongest events first. The largest in the file is a magnitude 7.7 (Mw) earthquake on October 28, 2012, 83 km SSW of Sandspit, BC.
3. To keep one province, filter the unnamed column_8, which holds the province or state after the place name. It is free text whose spelling changed over the years and which sometimes carries a note such as Felt or Aftershock, so use a contains filter, which ignores case, and repeat it for each spelling: BC and B.C. for British Columbia, or QC and QUE for Quebec.
4. To keep one year, type the year with a hyphen, such as 2015-, in the date column filter: a plain value is a contains filter, and dates are written as 2015-06-21T….
5. Switch to the chart view to count events or compare magnitudes, and export the filtered rows as CSV, up to 10,000 rows per export.

Read the fields

Column	Meaning
date	Origin time, in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC, +0000)
latitude, longitude	Epicentre, in decimal degrees
depth	Depth of the event below the surface; for most earthquakes it is poorly known and often a nominal or default value
magnitude	Size of the event
magnitude type	How the magnitude was measured: ML is local (Richter) magnitude, MN is the Nuttli magnitude used for eastern Canada and Mw is moment magnitude; codes such as MLSn, mb and MS also appear
place	Distance and direction from the nearest named place
column_8	Province, territory or state, sometimes followed by a note such as Felt or Aftershock

Magnitudes of different types are not strictly comparable, so read magnitude type before ranking events, and keep the type when you quote a value. Earthquakes Canada puts the uncertainty of a magnitude estimate at about plus or minus 0.3 units. Most rows are small events: more than four in five are below magnitude 3.

Know the limits

The file stops at the end of 2019 and is a snapshot of the catalogue; later revisions of an event's location or magnitude are not reflected in it. Smaller events are more likely to be recorded where seismograph stations are dense, so a difference in counts between two regions can reflect the network as well as the ground.

The same rows are published as a French table, Tremblements de terre canadien (français), whose columns are named profondeur and type de magnitude. The dataset also offers KML, file geodatabase and map service formats for GIS work.

Check the official source

For events after 2019, recent earthquakes and the authoritative record of any event, search the National Earthquake Database on Earthquakes Canada: it provides bulletin data from 1985 onward and filters by time, magnitude, depth, event type and area. Its information for the last year is preliminary and may change. The Government of Canada's dataset page carries NRCan's description and the original files.

When you share a finding, include the CanQuery dataset page, the filters you used and the date you consulted it.

Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada.