Haiti Quakes


The magnitude 7.0 earthquake that caused more than 200,000 casualties and devastated Haiti’s economy in January 2010 resulted not from the Enriquillo fault, as previously believed, but from slip on multiple faults as well as primarily on a previously unknown, subsurface fault – according to a study published online this week in Nature Geoscience. In addition, because the earthquake did not involve a slip near the Earth’s surface, the study suggests that it did not release all of the strain that has built up on faults in the area over the past two centuries, meaning that future surface rupturing earthquakes in this region are likely.


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