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Winnipeg Free Press
a day ago
- Science
- Winnipeg Free Press
Study maps ‘megathrust' quake zone off northern B.C., but risk may be far in future
Scientists have captured the first detailed images of the meeting of two tectonic plates off the coast of northern British Columbia, an area they say has the potential to generate the largest 'megathrust' earthquakes and tsunamis. The images confirm what appears to be a rare geological occurrence, a subduction zone in its 'infancy,' the study by U.S. and Canadian researchers shows. The paper, in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances, says the Queen Charlotte plate boundary features the beginnings of such a zone, where one plate slides under the other. The plate boundary that extends from the southern tip of Haida Gwaii to southeast Alaska was the site of Canada's two largest earthquakes in recent history — a magnitude-8.1 quake in 1949 and the magnitude-7.8 quake in 2012. Co-author Michael Bostock, a professor in the department of earth, ocean and atmospheric sciences at the University of B.C., says it's likely the area will see more 'thrust' quakes, and the next one could be larger as the fault grows. The good news for people living on B.C.'s north coast, he says, is that a quake of similar magnitude to the one in 2012 isn't likely for several hundred years. 'In a sense, the concern is passed, at least for the next few generations of people.' The quake in 1949 was caused by tectonic plates moving side by side along a fault, known as a 'strike-slip' earthquake. These are far less likely to produce tsunamis. The 2012 quake, meanwhile, bore hallmarks of subduction, which produces the largest megathrust quakes. But until the study published last month, there was no detailed imaging confirming it, says Bostock. 'Megathrust is just a fancy name for a thrust fault, a shallow-dipping thrust fault, where subduction is taking place. So, yes, what we're imaging here is a nascent megathrust.' Recent megathrust earthquakes include last month's 8.8-magnitude quake off the coast of southeast Russia, and the massive quakes that triggered devastating tsunamis off Japan in 2011 and Indonesia in 2004. Prior to the 2012 quake off Haida Gwaii, researchers had been debating whether subduction was a feature of the Queen Charlotte plate boundary, Bostock says. The quake strongly suggested an 'under-thrusting fault,' and the detailed imaging has confirmed it, he says. 'The geometry of the Haida Gwaii thrust suggests that larger thrust earthquakes could nucleate along the margin and that tsunamis could be more common, both of which substantially increase the hazard of the region,' the paper says. The site is a 'rare example' of the beginnings of subduction, with the imaging 'capturing this fundamental tectonic process in its infancy,' it says. Still, it says the future of the Queen Charlotte plate boundary is uncertain. 'While it has efficiently evolved to its current state, subduction initiation can fail at any stage before self-sustained subduction is reached; thus, the (plate boundary) evolving to this point does not guarantee a future outcome,' the paper says. Bostock says there's debate about how quickly the Pacific plate is moving into the North American plate, but it's somewhere between 1/2 and 2 1/2 centimetres per year, along a roughly 200-kilometre stretch off the Haida Gwaii coast. By contrast, the Cascadia subduction zone spans about 1,000 kilometres from northern Vancouver Island to northern California, and the tectonic plates are converging at a faster rate, closer to four centimetres per year, he says. The Cascadia zone is expected to produce a massive quake sometime in the next 200 to 500 years — but that's not likely at the Haida Gwaii site, Bostock says. 'So, because it's a smaller fault area, and because the convergence is smaller, something like half as much as it is in Cascadia … we're not likely to have another big (megathrust) earthquake off of Haida Gwaii in the near future.' The relatively smaller size of the fault off Haida Gwaii limits the size of quakes it may produce, Bostock adds. The 7.8 quake in 2012 is 'probably as big as we're likely to get, unless the zone grows bigger,' which it may do over a long period of time, he says. The quake in 2012 rattled much of north-central B.C., including Haida Gwaii, Prince Rupert and Quesnel, and triggered a tsunami warning for coastal areas. It also altered the flow and temperature of culturally important hot springs on a small island within the southeast Haida Gwaii archipelago. Lindsay Worthington, another co-author of the paper, says the site offers a 'natural laboratory' for the study of plate boundaries, describing it as 'one of the only places on the planet' where researchers can observe subduction in its infancy. The images were captured in 'unprecedented' detail by dragging a 15-kilometre-long hydrophone array behind a ship. 'Without knowing really what the subsurface looks like, there's only so much that you can infer,' says Worthington, a professor in the department of earth and planetary sciences at the University of New Mexico. 'Now that we have these pretty definite geometries … we can have better understanding of what types of events happened in the past, and then that gives you insights into what's possible in the future.' While a giant earthquake is not imminent off Haida Gwaii, Worthington says the Queen Charlotte plate boundary is still 'the largest natural hazard in Canada.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 11, 2025.
Global News
04-08-2025
- Health
- Global News
What killed the sea stars? Canadian researchers unlock 12-year-old mystery
A team led by researchers in British Columbia has solved the mystery of a gruesome disease that has killed billions of sea stars along the Pacific coast of North America, more than a decade after the die off. Melanie Prentice, the lead author of a new study, recalls a moment of 'not really believing it' when researchers found a strain of bacteria that was abundant in diseased sea stars and absent in healthy ones. 'My initial reaction was like, 'Okay, so I've done something wrong,'' she said. Prentice said the team spent months trying to disprove their findings, ultimately confirming they had cracked the code of the disease. They found the bacterium Vibrio pectenicida is a clear cause of sea star wasting disease. '(It's) a question that researchers have been trying to answer for about 12 years, so we're beyond thrilled,' said Prentice, a research associate at the Hakai Institute and the University of B.C. department of earth, ocean and atmospheric sciences. Story continues below advertisement The paper detailing the four-year research project and its findings were published online in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Ecology & Evolution on Monday. Alyssa Gehman, who helped launch the project in 2021, described the disease as 'gruesome,' causing sea stars to develop lesions, lose their arms and 'disappear into mush' about a week or two after exposure to the pathogen. It has been especially deadly for sunflower sea stars, killing about six billion of the species that can sprout 24 arms and span up to a metre. The giant sea stars are now considered functionally extinct across much of their former range off the coast of the continental United States, with losses exceeding 87 per cent in the 'northern refuges' where they still persist, the study said. The collapse has had cascading impacts, including widespread losses of ecologically, culturally and economically important kelp forests. 'I think we didn't really appreciate how important they were until we lost them,' Prentice said, describing the orange, purple or brown sunflower stars as a 'keystone' species with an outsized impact on their ecosystem. Get breaking National news For news impacting Canada and around the world, sign up for breaking news alerts delivered directly to you when they happen. Sign up for breaking National newsletter Sign Up By providing your email address, you have read and agree to Global News' Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy The giant sea stars are top predators, striking fear into other invertebrates. 'Almost everything that lives on the ground underwater runs away from them when they're coming,' said Gehman, a marine disease ecologist at the Hakai Institute and an adjunct professor at the University of B.C.'s Institute of Oceans and Fisheries. Story continues below advertisement They keep sea urchin populations in check, in turn ensuring the health of help forests that provide habitat and food for numerous other species. The devastation of the sunflower sea stars has caused a 'total ecosystem shift,' Prentice said, transforming biodiverse kelp forests into 'urchin barrens.' The bacterium that causes sea star wasting disease had remained elusive for more than a decade since sea stars were first observed dying in large numbers in 2013. The same bacterium has been known to attack scallop larvae. Prentice said the breakthrough came after the research team switched from examining diseased tissues to focusing on the sea stars' coelomic fluid, likening it to the blood of the sea star. Earlier research had involved running the tissues through tiny membrane filters that would have excluded bacteria, which are typically larger than viruses, she explained. The Hakai Institute team started by replicating the initial experiments, but they weren't able to cause disease in healthy sea stars, she said. 'We were doing everything we could and we were just never ever able to cause disease, and so to us that suggested that the pathogen is larger than a virus.' However, after pivoting to coelomic fluid, which Prentice described as 'essentially sea water,' the researchers did trigger disease in healthy sea stars. Story continues below advertisement 'That suggested that the pathogen was in that fluid, and so then we just end up working with a much cleaner, easier tissue type to investigate,' she said. From there, Prentice created a list of all the different microbial species found in wasting sea stars and compare it against the healthy stars in the lab. 'I finally got to a place where I generated these different lists and it was very evident right away that there (were) tons of different Vibrio species within our wasting sea stars and we weren't really seeing that in our healthy sea stars,' she said. Prentice said she then filtered the genetic data to look at each strain of Vibrio bacteria, which led to their eureka moment with Vibrio pectenicida. 'We just saw it in every single wasting sea star sample, and then we looked at our controls and it was just not in any of them,' she said. Prentice said other researchers had wished her 'good luck' when she joined the project, but there was skepticism over whether they would solve the mystery. It felt 'incredible' to be part of a discovery that could help make a meaningful difference in the recovery of sea stars and their ecosystems, she said. Gehman, too, said she wasn't sure the project would result in a singular answer. Story continues below advertisement 'I thought it would be complicated. I thought there would be multiple things relying on other things,' she said. 'This was much clearer than I was expecting.' The discovery allows researchers to turn their efforts to deeper questions, including the possible role of warming ocean temperatures and the potential to breed sea stars in captivity to promote disease resistance and spur recovery, she said. The disease now appears to be seasonal, with outbreaks occurring in the warmer months, suggesting temperature may be a factor, said Gehman, adding she will soon conduct temperature experiments to investigate further. 'Does Vibrio pectenicida grow faster at warmer temperatures and the sea star can sort of survive at the growth rates at cooler temperatures, but when you get to warmer temperatures, they can't, is that what's happening?' The findings could help researchers understand where sea stars may struggle or survive with climate change in the future, Gehman said. Prentice said there are 'remnant' populations of sunflower stars along the B.C. coast, and its 'very possible' some could be more resistant to the wasting disease. She said finding and selectively breeding sea stars with a higher capacity to fight off the disease could produce 'superstar' sea stars for reintroduction in the wild. 'It seems like science fiction sometimes, but people are working on it,' she said.
Vancouver Sun
04-08-2025
- Health
- Vancouver Sun
B.C. researchers now know what's causing billions of sea stars to die
B.C. researchers have unlocked the mystery of why billions of sea stars have died over the past decade from B.C. to Alaska and to Mexico. An international study, published Monday in Nature Ecology and Evolution and led by researchers at the University of B.C., the B.C.-based Hakai Institute and the University of Washington, found that sea star wasting disease is caused by a strain of the bacterium Vibrio pectenicida — one that is related to cholera in humans. Other vibrio species can cause disease in corals and oysters. Sea star wasting disease is considered one of the largest marine epidemics documented, said Alyssa Gehman, senior author of the study and a marine disease ecologist at the Hakai Institute and UBC. Start your day with a roundup of B.C.-focused news and opinion. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Sunrise will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. Gehman said they estimate about six billion sunflower stars have been lost, and that's just one of 26 species of sea star affected by the disease. She said the four-year investigation into the cause was challenging because scientists understand very little about sea stars and what types of pathogens they carry. 'The other big challenge is that right after this disease outbreak, it killed many, many sea stars. And to do the type of work that we did, you need to have animals that don't have the disease, and particularly in sunflower stars, right after the big outbreak there were several years where most had died,' she said. 'We lost 90 per cent of the global population of sunflower stars.' She said sunflower stars, now considered a critically endangered species, used to be abundant in B.C. and could be found in places like the waters off Stanley Park. 'Now there's very little chance you will see them.' It's a disease that sounds like something out of a horror film. The sunflower stars start twisting their arms before they deflate, said Gehman. 'They can kind of look like a partially deflated balloon. They'll have wrinkles in their in their skin, you can sometimes get lesions, or sort of like holes in their dermis, where their organs will fall out … and then the next stage is they'll lose an arm,' she said. 'The arm will sort of walk away from the body, it's really horrifying.' Then, they will lose the rest of their arms and begin to disintegrate. 'They sort of end up just being a goopy pile of former sea star. It's horrible,' she said. Sea stars are important to the ocean ecosystem because they are what scientists call a keystone species, keeping nature in balance. With the loss of sea stars, one of their main food sources — urchins — began to thrive and when that happened urchins munched on kelp forests, decimating some of these important carbon sinks. Kelp forests also provide habitat for an abundance of marine life and protect coastlines from storms. The team of scientists discovered the bacteria was the cause by conducting a series of challenge studies, where they collected healthy sea stars and quarantined them for two weeks to ensure they were disease free. Then they would collect some from the wild showing signs of the start of the disease and conduct experiments on how it was transmitted. Now that scientists have identified the pathogen that causes the wasting disease, they can start to look into where it came from and what's causing it. 'It's exciting that we have the opportunity to actually look into that. And there's lots of different ways for us to start to piece together what happened, but at this point, we don't actually know where it came from,' said Gehman. Gehman said they believe there is a link between rising ocean temperatures and wasting disease because other species of vibrio are known to thrive in warmer water. Also, she said there have been 'refuge areas' where the outbreaks haven't been as bad and they are in cooler water, such as B.C.'s Central Coast. 'So if the sea stars are in cooler water, it seems like consequences of the disease is lower,' she said, adding more research is needed to understand how temperature plays a role in the wasting disease. The team can also start to look into a cure. Gehman said there has been success with coral in using probiotics to fight off disease so that might be one avenue for exploration with sea stars. She said scientists in the U.S. are breeding and raising sunflower stars in the lab in an attempt to try to find stars that are resistant to this pathogen. 'If we find resistant stars, and we're able to raise them, maybe we can help the populations survive into the future,' she said. The study was also in collaboration with the Nature Conservancy, the Tula Foundation, the U.S. Geological Survey's Western Fisheries Research Center, and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. ticrawford@
Winnipeg Free Press
04-08-2025
- Health
- Winnipeg Free Press
Canadian researchers solve 12-year mystery of sea star wasting disease
A team led by researchers in British Columbia has solved the mystery of a gruesome disease that has killed billions of sea stars along the Pacific coast of North America, more than a decade after the die off. Melanie Prentice, the lead author of a new study, recalls a moment of 'not really believing it' when researchers found a strain of bacteria that was abundant in diseased sea stars and absent in healthy ones. 'My initial reaction was like, 'Okay, so I've done something wrong,'' she said. Prentice said the team spent months trying to disprove their findings, ultimately confirming they had cracked the code of the disease. They found the bacterium Vibrio pectenicida is a clear cause of sea star wasting disease. '(It's) a question that researchers have been trying to answer for about 12 years, so we're beyond thrilled,' said Prentice, a research associate at the Hakai Institute and the University of B.C. department of earth, ocean and atmospheric sciences. The paper detailing the four-year research project and its findings were published online in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Ecology & Evolution on Monday. Alyssa Gehman, who helped launch the project in 2021, described the disease as 'gruesome,' causing sea stars to develop lesions, lose their arms and 'disappear into mush' about a week or two after exposure to the pathogen. It has been especially deadly for sunflower sea stars, killing about six billion of the species that can sprout 24 arms and span up to a metre. The giant sea stars are now considered functionally extinct across much of their former range off the coast of the continental United States, with losses exceeding 87 per cent in the 'northern refuges' where they still persist, the study said. The collapse has had cascading impacts, including widespread losses of ecologically, culturally and economically important kelp forests. 'I think we didn't really appreciate how important they were until we lost them,' Prentice said, describing the orange, purple or brown sunflower stars as a 'keystone' species with an outsized impact on their ecosystem. The giant sea stars are top predators, striking fear into other invertebrates. 'Almost everything that lives on the ground underwater runs away from them when they're coming,' said Gehman, a marine disease ecologist at the Hakai Institute and an adjunct professor at the University of B.C.'s Institute of Oceans and Fisheries. They keep sea urchin populations in check, in turn ensuring the health of help forests that provide habitat and food for numerous other species. The devastation of the sunflower sea stars has caused a 'total ecosystem shift,' Prentice said, transforming biodiverse kelp forests into 'urchin barrens.' The bacterium that causes sea star wasting disease had remained elusive for more than a decade since sea stars were first observed dying in large numbers in 2013. The same bacterium has been known to attack scallop larvae. Prentice said the breakthrough came after the research team switched from examining diseased tissues to focusing on the sea stars' coelomic fluid, likening it to the blood of the sea star. Earlier research had involved running the tissues through tiny membrane filters that would have excluded bacteria, which are typically larger than viruses, she explained. The Hakai Institute team started by replicating the initial experiments, but they weren't able to cause disease in healthy sea stars, she said. 'We were doing everything we could and we were just never ever able to cause disease, and so to us that suggested that the pathogen is larger than a virus.' However, after pivoting to coelomic fluid, which Prentice described as 'essentially sea water,' the researchers did trigger disease in healthy sea stars. 'That suggested that the pathogen was in that fluid, and so then we just end up working with a much cleaner, easier tissue type to investigate,' she said. From there, Prentice created a list of all the different microbial species found in wasting sea stars and compare it against the healthy stars in the lab. 'I finally got to a place where I generated these different lists and it was very evident right away that there (were) tons of different Vibrio species within our wasting sea stars and we weren't really seeing that in our healthy sea stars,' she said. Prentice said she then filtered the genetic data to look at each strain of Vibrio bacteria, which led to their eureka moment with Vibrio pectenicida. 'We just saw it in every single wasting sea star sample, and then we looked at our controls and it was just not in any of them,' she said. Prentice said other researchers had wished her 'good luck' when she joined the project, but there was skepticism over whether they would solve the mystery. It felt 'incredible' to be part of a discovery that could help make a meaningful difference in the recovery of sea stars and their ecosystems, she said. Gehman, too, said she wasn't sure the project would result in a singular answer. 'I thought it would be complicated. I thought there would be multiple things relying on other things,' she said. 'This was much clearer than I was expecting.' The discovery allows researchers to turn their efforts to deeper questions, including the possible role of warming ocean temperatures and the potential to breed sea stars in captivity to promote disease resistance and spur recovery, she said. The disease now appears to be seasonal, with outbreaks occurring in the warmer months, suggesting temperature may be a factor, said Gehman, adding she will soon conduct temperature experiments to investigate further. 'Does Vibrio pectenicida grow faster at warmer temperatures and the sea star can sort of survive at the growth rates at cooler temperatures, but when you get to warmer temperatures, they can't, is that what's happening?' The findings could help researchers understand where sea stars may struggle or survive with climate change in the future, Gehman said. Prentice said there are 'remnant' populations of sunflower stars along the B.C. coast, and its 'very possible' some could be more resistant to the wasting disease. She said finding and selectively breeding sea stars with a higher capacity to fight off the disease could produce 'superstar' sea stars for reintroduction in the wild. 'It seems like science fiction sometimes, but people are working on it,' she said. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 4, 2025.
Vancouver Sun
03-08-2025
- Business
- Vancouver Sun
U.S. trade frameworks create 'shifting landscape' as B.C. looks to cultivate LNG markets
At the same time Premier David Eby was touting B.C.'s potential to export liquefied natural gas to Asia, U.S. President Donald Trump was unveiling his county's trade framework agreement with South Korea, which included a commitment to purchase US$100 billion of American LNG. Tying energy to easing up on tariff threats has become a common theme in Trump's attempt to reorder the U.S. trading landscape, either with purchase commitments or contributions to American energy infrastructure, an element in a framework reached with Japan. Such agreements create a 'shifting landscape' for the LNG market that Canada will have to navigate with partners apparently willing to pay premiums for American energy in exchange for their 'strategic partnership' with the U.S., said University of B.C. trade economist Werner Antweiler. Stay on top of the latest real estate news and home design trends. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Westcoast Homes will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. Eby's Asia trade mission, mere weeks before the U.S. deals were announced, sought to cultivate B.C.'s trade relationship with both countries, and he left sounding assured about the province's potential. Eby spoke about meetings B.C. representatives had with LNG Canada's key partners: the Korean gas utility KOGAS, Mitsubishi in Japan and Malaysia's Petronas, where executives 'underlined how important it was to them that this project was able to be reliable.' However, Antweiler, chair in international trade policy at UBC's Sauder School of Business, noted that the U.S. is also willing to 'simply use their influence to bully trade partners into beneficial trade deals on energy. 'Some have called it a protection racket,' Antweiler said. 'Korea buys U.S. energy at a premium or preferentially, and in turn U.S. provides military protection, rather than for the U.S.'s own geostrategic benefit.' LNG's buyers — major utility firms — purchase fuel on long-term contracts and Antweiler said it is likely the South Korea deal will result in a 'reshuffling market share,' with new U.S. imports replacing its expiring contracts with Qatari LNG suppliers. 'Their overall demand for LNG is not increasing much and is down from a peak in 2021,' Antweiler said. In rough estimate, he estimated it could increase the U.S. share of South Korea's market to about one third from five per cent now. In the case of Japan, the notice from Trump's White House dated July 23, said the sides are 'exploring a new offtake agreement for Alaskan LNG,' with a proposal that is in its early stages, but which is vying for the same market share as B.C. 'Japan's commitment to Alaskan LNG may be looked at through the perspective of energy security too,' Antweiler said. Energy Minister Adrian Dix argued that the LNG projects in the works 'have real advantages over other projects, say the Alaska project, and everything else.' 'Obviously we only control what we control, the provincial and the federal government,' Dix said. However, he added that the provincial and federal governments are 'working closely' with LNG Canada related to the company's yet-to-be approved Phase 2. LNG Canada, a consortium of five partners including Shell, Malaysian state-owned Petronas, PetroChina, Mitsubishi Corp. and KOGAS, is contemplating a $30-billion addition to its Kitimat plant that would nearly double its capacity to 26 million tonnes of LNG per year from 14 million tonnes per year now. A spokesperson for LNG Canada said the company itself isn't involved in sales: its joint-venture partners determine where the product is delivered and sold. Dix, however, said 'we feel that our (LNG Canada Phase 2) is a really outstanding project and we're optimistic about it. But at the same time, it's not entirely our decision. It is a reason why you want to settle all the issues so that the sooner they move forward, the better it is for B.C. and for everybody.' Dix added that before now, B.C. didn't have the option of offshore exports for natural gas, the province's biggest export commodity, worth $16 billion in trade in 2024. And the U.S. trade deals underline the importance for B.C. to diversify. 'If you ask me, do I worry? I worry every day about everything,' Dix said. 'Because there's a lot at stake for B.C. and we've got to continue to meet our economic goals, we've got to continue to create more wealth and energy sovereignty.' Antweiler said Canada might need to turn to 'countries that are not constrained by trade deals with the United States.' 'It's all a matter of reshuffling trade directions, but in the end the LNG market is global,' he added. 'World supply and world demand must be clear, no matter what the U.S. does.' depenner@
