“…Although there is a general agreement that some of these earthquakes occur along favorably oriented ancient rifts (Schulte & Mooney, 2005;Stein et al, 1989;Sykes, 1978;Zoback & Richardson, 1996) and other major strength contrasts (Gallen & Thigpen, 2018;Mooney et al, 2012), there is no consensus on the sources of intraplate deformation and earthquakes. The intraplate events in North America have been variously attributed to glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA; Mazzotti et al, 2005;Muir-Wood, 2000), ridge push effects (Zoback & Zoback, 1981, 1980, dynamics of fault interaction (Liu & Stein, 2016), mantle weakening due to rifting or a plume event (Chen et al, 2016), gravitational body Bent (1996) forces (Levandowski et al, 2016(Levandowski et al, , 2017, or large-scale convection (Forte et al, 2007). The role of GIA in reactivating these faults by perturbing the background stress has been proposed in relation to the 1929 Grand Banks (M7.2) and the 1933 Baffin Bay (Mw7.4) events (Bent, 1995(Bent, , 2002.…”