Seismic waves are energy waves that travel through the earth or water and are usually created by explosions, volcanoes, earth slides or anything that slams into the planet.
In case you didn’t know it, Yellowknife has a seismic station located out by the golf course that records volcanoes going off around the planet. It was first built after the Second World War to detect if the USSR was doing any underground nuclear testing. Ironically, it will now be detecting the war in Ukraine.
The station will, of course, be recording all the blasting going on in and around Yellowknife. It has a lot to record because Yellowknife is a blast crazy town as the government and various contractors seem to be trying to blow up all the outcrops in town and turn the city into one big, developed muck pile of broken rock.
If you let off a big blast to break rock the explosion creates seismic waves that race through the rock, the soil and, yes, even the water. It is, in effect, a small human created earthquake. If you feel the ground shake and your house shakes, that is equivalent to a four or five on the Richter scale and it can start to create a little structural damage.
If your house is subjected to numerous of these earth tremors, eventually a crack may appear in your foundation, ceiling or walls and it will get bigger with the more earthquakes it goes through. Years ago, I tried to explain this to some city engineers and planners, and they scoffed at the concept, but I assure you it is very real. The waves also go through the ground and affect the soils, water and sewer pipes, permafrost and soil compaction. It probably also affects things in your house if they are of a delicate nature.
I believe it is a very real problem and one where the city should be doing an ongoing study to see just how much of a problem they are creating. I would also like to see charts over the years at just how much blasting has been going on. Not just to structures and sensitive electronics but also to soils and permafrost. I assume the permafrost gets shaken badly, cracks, and this encourages it to melt faster. Also, what are the effects on all our water and sewer lines? I am willing to bet that some of the breaks and leaks are a result of all the blasting.
Some blast sites run for months, and they blast two or three times a day. So while one blast may not be noticeable, several hundred blasts year after year is a lot of seismic energy going through the ground. If it were all plotted on maps one could see if there was a correlation between the blasts and the water and sewer line breaks. Plus, the permafrost melting. The less permafrost is disturbed the better.
From a geological point of view, I see it as an ongoing problem that the city just ignores. Ignorance is bliss. But we all pay a price for that ignorance and the city occasionally has a whooper of a blast. Whatever rules and regulations there are about the size of a blast in or near Yellowknife are either nonexistent or ignored. When they were putting in the bypass road they let off some big blasts, felt throughout the city and out by Giant Mine, where the underground vaults are. Was any of this taken into consideration, I wonder?
Personally, I think any outcrop in or near the city should be checked out by a geologist or prospector to make sure the rock is suitable for blasting. There are patches of rock with a lot of sulfide minerals in them that should not be blasted or used for fill.
While we are on the earth sciences, what is the carbon footprint of all this drilling and blasting? Does it make sense from an ecological point of view? We really need to look at all the consequences of our actions. On the local level, I would like to know how much damage all the blasting in town is doing.