Seismicity along the eastern margin of the North American Plate

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Abstract
The eastern boundary of the North American Plate is marked by a narrow and continuous belt of seismic activity. The earthquake zone follows the crest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and its associated fracture zones (F.Z.) (Fig. 1; Plate 8A; Vogt, this volume, Ch. 12.) and is intimately related to the process of plate separation, transform faulting, and generation of oceanic crust. This part of the Mid-Atlantic plate boundary has the advantage of being relatively close to the dense seismograph networks of North America and Europe, and has therefore been the subject of more study than most other parts of the oceanic rift system. For this reason it has sometimes been taken as the type example of an oceanic rift, which can be misleading. Other segments of the ridge system, such as parts of the East Pacific Rise, have been shown to possess a distinctly different seismicity pattern (Stover, 1973), with most earthquakes occurring along the fracture zones and practically no seismicity along the ridge axes. In this paper we will describe the main features of the seismicity of the mid-oceanic ridge system in the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans and how it relates to the physical state and processes near the plate boundary. Intraplate earthquakes, that is events within the North American Plate, are dealt with by Zoback and others (this volume). Because of the enormous amount of literature on the subject no attempt has been made to give complete reference to every paper. For more complete references

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