Haiti Earthquake Disaster Little Surprise to Some Seismologists

Scientific American ^ | 1/13/2010 | Katherine Harmon

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

The devastating magnitude 7.0 quake that ripped through Haiti Tuesday, reportedly killing thousands, did not catch everyone by surprise.

In an interview last week for an unrelated story, Robert Yeats, a professor emeritus in geoscience at Oregon State University in Corvallis and co-author of a June 1989 article for Scientific American "Hidden Earthquakes," said that an imminent big west coast earthquake concerned him far less than a "big one" that might occur in Haiti, due to the large fault near the capital city of Port-au-Prince—and the poverty-driven low level of earthquake-preparedness there.

"If they have an earthquake on this fault that runs through Port-au-Prince," the death toll would be tremendous, he said January 6.

The fault, called the Enriquillo-Plaintain Garden Fault, runs some 16 kilometers from Port-au-Prince and is at the intersection of the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates, which are slowly sliding past one another. This movement creates a strike-slip fault, the same kind as the San Andreas Fault in California, where the North American and Pacific plates are sliding in different directions. And like the San Andreas, the Enriquillo-Plaintain Garden Fault has been building up pressure.

"The fault has been more or less locked for 200 years," British Geological Survey seismologist Roger Musson explained to TIME. In this area, where the Caribbean plate is moving east against the North American Plate, plate movement is about seven millimeters per year, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said.

[MarkL]

The last time Vesuvius let go was back in 1944. Here is what happened to American warplanes based near the volcano. I've also seen pictures of American soldiers in close proximity to hot lava flows engulfing Italian buildings.

Yes, but this seismologist was saying that the upcoming events could rival that of what destroyed Pompeii back around 70 AD. IIRC there was about 12' of volcanic ash carried by superheated gasses, not a dusting...

Hey, I just noticed: I guess they didn't get the ash cleaned off the tail of the plane when that photo was taken. The front landing gear is off the ground!

Mark

[ops33]

Same thing about the fault line going through Charleston, SC. No serious earthquakes since the 1880’s but one will happen sooner or later. Many do not even know there is a fault zone there.

[Cheburashka]

Obviously the size of the last eruption isn't a good predictor of the size of the next eruption.

Vesuvius is to the east of Naples. There is also large caldera just to the west of Naples. If both let go simultaneously Naples could conceivably be turned into a Pompeii with a million people.

[JustaDumbBlonde]

"A big New Madrid quake would be a game changer."

Major damage in Memphis is almost unthinkable, and FEMA better have their A game on because the looting will ensue in hours, and riots very quickly thereafter. Which really means that it's gonna get bad, because I have no confidence whatsoever in the government.

[Travis McGee]

A major New Madrid quake is the setup for my last novel. There's a long excerpt here that describes a lot of the quake aftermath.

It's one year after two New Madrid earthquakes have devastated the Mississippi Valley. Battalions of foreign peackeepers are occupying Tennessee, at the invitation of the President. Phil Carson, (from "Enemies Foreign And Domestic"), and three strangers are hiding in a well-stocked cave, which is a guerrilla fighter's lair. Across the region Kazakh "contract peacekeepers" are wiping out the last remaining American holdouts, who have rejected the federal government's order to abandon their homes and move to "relocation centers." This scene is in the middle of the novel.