Baffin Island Broadband Offshore Seismology

The Baffin-Labrador Seaway is the product of continental rifting and seafloor spreading between Greenland and the eastern Canadian Arctic. Although rifting has ceased, it has left dense networks of faults that host abundant seismicity today. In northwestern Baffin Bay, ~1300 earthquakes of M>3 have been recorded over the past 30 years by the land-based CNSN network. These earthquakes pose hazard to communities on the northeastern coast of Baffin Island and western Greenland. The remoteness and vast scale of this area has historically made it extremely challenging to survey with seismic or acoustic instruments, leaving it poorly characterized in many contexts.

The BIBOS project seeks to improve understanding of the geodynamic processes in northern Baffin Bay, including characterizing the tectonic stress field, locations/dimensions of potentially seismogenic faults, intraplate earthquake recurrence intervals and large-scale crustal structure. This information will be used to improve seismic hazard assessments in the eastern Canadian Arctic. OBS data can also be used to characterize the underwater acoustic environment, which has become increasingly important for both military and civilian applications in the region.

A network of 28 Aquarius ocean-bottom seismometers (OBS) from the National Facility for Seismological Investigations (Dalhousie University) was deployed from September 2024 through October 2025 in the western half of northern Baffin Bay. The array covers an area of notable seismicity between the coast of Baffin Island and the dormant rift structure which runs approximately down the center of the bay.

This project is a collaborative effort involving scientists from Dalhousie University, the Geological Survey of Canada and Defense Research and Development Canada (DRDC), and forms part of the larger ICE-OBS (Investigating Canada's Eastern Offshore with Broadband Seismology) initiative to study the Canadian Atlantic and Arctic offshore regions.