On that faithful day, there was an Armageddon-like disaster that struck the small island of Haiti. Killing more than 150, 000 people, and the 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck and have been embedded to Haitians minds forever.
The lithosphere is a 100-125 kilometer outermost layer of the earth. It is strong and rigid and only a peeling compared to other mechanically defined shells of the planet earth. There are two types of this shell one is the Oceanic lithosphere which lies under the oceans and the continental lithosphere lies on the continental regions.
Plate tectonics is the large scale motions of the lithosphere, hence the seismic activity called earthquakes. In time, these plates move directly away from each other. There are driving forces in which they move such as ridge push, gravitational sliding, slab pull, and by density inversion.
It was due to natures production of natural disasters like this could make tectonic plate shifts. One of which occurred in the boundary of the Caribbean tectonic plate which shifted 20 millimeters a year contrasting the North American plate.
There are two branches of the of the strike-slip fault system which includes Septentrional-Orient Fault in the north and the Enriquillo-Plaintain Garden Fault in the south. The main quake was due to the Enriquillo-Plaintain Garden fault according to the focal mechanism. The latter has been under stress for the last 250 years and the rupture was 40 miles giving an earth-shattering quake to Haitians.
The world should have expected the disaster with a lot of studies backing it up. Prior studies show that there was a tendency of seismic activity and was publicly presented over the 18th Caribbean Geologic Conference on March 2008. Even studies by C. Demets and M. Wiggins predicted a 7.2 magnitude earthquake on 2007. Also, Patrick Charles, a geologist cited on September 2008 that there may be a high risk of earthquakes in Port-au-Prince. Having such data, it should have been ample to react pre-emptively hence the deaths and damages can be minimal.
The lithosphere is a 100-125 kilometer outermost layer of the earth. It is strong and rigid and only a peeling compared to other mechanically defined shells of the planet earth. There are two types of this shell one is the Oceanic lithosphere which lies under the oceans and the continental lithosphere lies on the continental regions.
Plate tectonics is the large scale motions of the lithosphere, hence the seismic activity called earthquakes. In time, these plates move directly away from each other. There are driving forces in which they move such as ridge push, gravitational sliding, slab pull, and by density inversion.
It was due to natures production of natural disasters like this could make tectonic plate shifts. One of which occurred in the boundary of the Caribbean tectonic plate which shifted 20 millimeters a year contrasting the North American plate.
There are two branches of the of the strike-slip fault system which includes Septentrional-Orient Fault in the north and the Enriquillo-Plaintain Garden Fault in the south. The main quake was due to the Enriquillo-Plaintain Garden fault according to the focal mechanism. The latter has been under stress for the last 250 years and the rupture was 40 miles giving an earth-shattering quake to Haitians.
The world should have expected the disaster with a lot of studies backing it up. Prior studies show that there was a tendency of seismic activity and was publicly presented over the 18th Caribbean Geologic Conference on March 2008. Even studies by C. Demets and M. Wiggins predicted a 7.2 magnitude earthquake on 2007. Also, Patrick Charles, a geologist cited on September 2008 that there may be a high risk of earthquakes in Port-au-Prince. Having such data, it should have been ample to react pre-emptively hence the deaths and damages can be minimal.
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