Natural hazards

Did you know that Canada is home to potentially active volcanoes? In the shadow of these seemingly sleeping giants lie powerful reminders of Canada’s volcanic past and important insights into possible future eruptions.

What, exactly, would happen if an earthquake occurred in your area? A team at Natural Resources Canada have some answers. They’ve crunched the data for a new, online planning tool — RiskProfiler — that provides a risk analysis of the damages, injuries and financial costs that might result from an earthquake. The consequences could be quite staggering.

In Cape Bathurst, where Canada's mainland meets the Arctic Ocean, an entire coastline is burning. Aptly named the Smoking Hills, it's home to a really unique geological feature: a deposit of sedimentary rock that's been burning and smouldering continuously for thousands of years. On this episode, we'll be speaking with a research scientist who visited the hellish landscape to study it first-hand.

Alex Normandeau is a research scientist studying submarine landslides. While aboard a Canadian Coast Guard ship in 2018, Alex and his team encountered an iceberg floating in the Southwind Fjord near Baffin Island. When they returned the following year, a new underwater landslide had occurred. See how they were able to connect the dots and discover that icebergs can indeed cause submarine landslides.