3S (2025-2026): Labrador-Iqaluit Broadband Offshore Seismology

• National Facility for Seismological Investigations (NFSI), Canada

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. 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 LIBOS project seeks to improve understanding of the geodynamic processes in the Labrador Sea, 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 22 Aquarius ocean-bottom seismometers (OBS) from the National Facility for Seismological Investigations (Dalhousie University) was deployed from October 2025 through September 2026 in the northern Labrador Sea. The array covers an area of notable seismicity near the shelf break southeast of Iqaluit, in line with Frobisher 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.

FDSN Web Services provide a common data access API for seismic data.

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