A University of Ottawa scientist will travel to Chile next week to search for lessons that Canadian engineers and emergency planners can draw from that country’s 8.8-magnitude earthquake.

Professor Murat Saatcioglu, one of Canada’s foremost earthquake engineers, will lead a team of 10 scientists to Chile on Tuesday.

They’ll examine buildings and bridges that collapsed in the quake to understand why they failed — and whether similar structures in Canada could withstand the same seismic shaking.

The questions are of particular concern on Canada’s Pacific coast, which has a geological fault similar to the one that produced Chile’s massive quake.

Both regions lie in “subduction zones,” where one tectonic plate grinds and pushes against another on top of it. A sudden slip along the fault can lift the overriding plate, creating what scientists call a “megathrust earthquake.”

Such earthquakes can displace huge amounts of ocean water, spawning a tsunami.

“The reason we wanted to go to Chile is that the fault mechanism that led to this earthquake is very similar to the subduction zone we have just west of Vancouver Island,” Saatcioglu said in an interview. “And the type of ground shaking is likely to be very similar since it’s a similar type of fault mechanism.”

Chile presents a compelling case study, and not only because its quake produced the kind of shaking expected to hit Vancouver and Victoria in the future. It also has in place similar building standards to those in Canada.

“Hopefully we’ll learn a lot, since we’ll be inspecting buildings and bridges which are designed — unlike Haiti — to current standards,” Saatcioglu said.

Haiti suffered more physical damage than Chile in a smaller quake because so many of its buildings were made of concrete diluted with sand or reinforced with poor steel.

The Canadian research team, sponsored by the Canadian Association for Earthquake Engineering, includes structural engineers, seismologists, tsunami experts and bridge engineers. They’re scheduled to travel to Santiago, Concepción and tsunami-damaged coastal towns during eight days of research.

The earthquake in Chile occurred in the same subduction zone that spawned the largest quake of the 20th century. On May 22, 1960, a magnitude-9.5 earthquake killed 1,655 people and generated a tsunami that devastated Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines.

Subduction zones give rise to mountain ranges and volcanic activity, but also produce the world’s largest earthquakes.

In the subduction zone of the Pacific Northwest, the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate is sliding under the much larger North American plate. Scientists know the stress building in the zone will eventually cause the plates to slip, triggering a high-magnitude earthquake, but they can’t predict when it will happen.

Geological deposits suggest large earthquakes have hit Canada’s Pacific coast 13 times in the past 6,000 years.

According to Natural Resources Canada, the last megathrust earthquake struck on Jan. 26, 1700, producing a 1,000-kilometre rupture along the Cascadia fault from Vancouver Island to northern California. It triggered a tsunami that swept across the Pacific.

While Ottawa is not at risk for a megathrust earthquake, it does sit in a seismically active valley. Dozens of earthquakes occur each year in eastern Ontario and western Quebec, but most are too mild to be felt.

Earth scientists consider the risk of a major quake here to be moderate: there is a 10-per-cent chance an earthquake will be strong enough to damage buildings in Ottawa during the next 50 years. Those areas with thick pockets of Leda clay under them, including parts of Carp and Orléans, are likely to experience more shaking and damage in a major temblor.