Haiti quake surprising - vIndianz.com

vIndianz.com (14 Jan, 2010) — The force of the Haiti earthquake that killed almost 500,000 people has left experts extremely astonished, with the scale 7 quake being touted as the strongest earthquake in over two centuries.

“It’s rather bizarre from a historical viewpoint,” the National Geographic Daily News quoted Julie Detton, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, as saying.

Haiti is part of the island of Hispaniola, which in addition hosts the Dominican Republic. The previous major earthquake to hit Haiti’s side of the island was in 1860.

Tuesday’s preliminary earthquake, which struck at about 5 p.m, spawned dozens of aftershocks, about 15 of which were scale 5 or greater. “It’s not something that we can project is going to occur. But certainly if you’re moving two [plates] in one area, you’re building up stress and strain in another,” Detton said.

According to the report, the Haiti earthquake was caused by the discharge of seismic stresses that had built up about two tectonic plates.

The motions of these plates generate what are recognized as strike-slip faults, where two sections of Earth’s crusts are grinding past each other in reverse directions, it adds.

“The Caribbean plate is moving eastward with regard to the North American plate,” Detton said.

When the stresses all along the fault lines arrive at a certain point, they can be released in bursts of energy that cause earthquakes, although it’s uncertain when the energy will be discharged as a series of small quakes or as one big temblor.

Since Haiti is very near to the border where the Caribbean and North American plates meet, fault lines associated to the plates” movements run right throughout the country, Detton said.

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Magnitude of Haiti quake surprising

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