M4.0 Earthquake near Banff, Canada — 16 October 2026

Light earthquakes are widely felt near the epicentre and can rattle windows, dishes and hanging objects. Damage is uncommon and usually limited to cracked plaster or fallen loose items.

A magnitude 4.0 earthquake radiates roughly 15 tons of TNT equivalent in seismic energy.

The USGS assigns this earthquake a significance score of 246, which is below the USGS threshold of more than 600 for its significant-earthquake list. The ranking combines magnitude with available Did You Feel It responses and PAGER alert level; it is not a direct measurement of damage.

That is about 03:04 local solar time at the epicentre, in the early hours of the morning.

This event was deeper than 69% of the 498 earthquakes recorded in Canada in our catalogue and stronger than 91% of them.

The epicentre was located at 51.4534, -115.4540 — 31 km north-northeast of Banff. The closest other recorded event was a magnitude 4.2 earthquake 33 km northwest of here on 26 January 2025.

The nearest other settlements in our records are Banff (33 km northwest) and Kimberley (214 km south-southwest).

At 8 km this was a shallow earthquake. Shallow events release their energy close to the surface, so for a given magnitude they produce noticeably stronger shaking — and more damage — than deeper ones. Roughly three quarters of all earthquakes worldwide occur at shallow depths.

This catalogue does not ingest eyewitness responses, so it cannot confirm where this earthquake was felt. Based on magnitude alone, an event this size is often felt across the surrounding area. Its shallow focus makes stronger surface shaking more likely than for a deeper event of the same magnitude.

The USGS record does not carry a link to NOAA tsunami information. That field is not an all-clear and does not state whether a tsunami occurred. In this case, a damaging tsunami would be less likely because at M4.0 it falls below the magnitude 6.5 threshold that generally applies before a submarine earthquake displaces enough water to generate a damaging tsunami; it occurred inland rather than beneath the sea floor. For an active coastal alert, use tsunami.gov or your local warning authority.

No further earthquakes have been recorded within about 150 km of the epicentre since this event was recorded.

2 earthquakes of magnitude 4 or above have been logged within roughly 200 km of this epicentre in our catalogue. The strongest was a magnitude 4.2 event near Nelson on 17 September 2026. This M4.0 event released about 2.0 times less energy than that event.

No other earthquakes have been recorded within 100 km of this epicentre in the past year, which makes this a genuinely isolated event.

This earthquake is part of the October 2026 worldwide record, and of earthquakes in Canada during October 2026. Browse the full monthly archive to compare periods.