A brand new 45-mile fault line has been discovered stretching along Canada’s Vancouver Island, just north of the Washington state border, and may pose a tsunami risk to people nearby.

The fault line was suspected to be lurking in the region by geologists, mineralogists and Earth and ocean scientists, who had recently found evidence of an earthquake occurring on the Saanich Peninsula between 4,700 and 2,300 years ago, according to new research in the journal Tectonics.

Proving difficult to find due to the thick forest coverage in the area, the fault line was finally found after intensive research.

“In the northern Cascadia forearc on the west coast of North America, high-resolution topography and geologic mapping show a [approximately] 2.3-m-high scarp across a [approximately] 14,000-year-old land surface 10 km [6.2 miles] north of downtown Victoria, British Columbia, Canada,” a team of researchers from France, the U.S. and Canada wrote in the paper.

If the fault were to see an earthquake, it could trigger a tsunami that would be catastrophic to those living nearby in both Canada and on the U.S. West coast.

“This newly identified fault, the XEOLXELEK-Elk Lake fault (XELF), crosses Saanich Peninsula within Greater Victoria and poses a hazard to the region’s [approximately] 400,000 inhabitants,” they said.

The fault line was discovered after a detailed investigation, involving shallow geophysical surveys, analyzing historical imagers, and remote sensing. The researchers found minerals in the rocks that indicated changes to the magnetic field over time, which suggests that the rock formations have been pulled apart or broken. This strongly implies the presence of a fault line.

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