The powerful earthquake that hit Haiti on Saturday killed hundreds and injured thousands more. The destruction comes just 11 years after a temblor killed tens…
The powerful earthquake that hit Haiti on Saturday killed hundreds and injured thousands more. The destruction comes just 11 years after a temblor killed tens of thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands. Some 100,000 buildings were destroyed in the 2010 quake. As rescuers search for survivors in the Caribbean nation, here’s a look at why Haiti has had so many devastating earthquakes over the centuries and why they are often so devastating. ___ WHAT MAKES HAITI PRONE TO EARTHQUAKES? The Earth’s crust is made up of tectonic plates that move. And Haiti sits near the intersection of two of them the North American plate and the Caribbean plate. Multiple fault lines between those plates cut through or near the island of Hispaniola, which Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic. What’s worse, not all of those fault lines behave the same way. “Hispaniola sits in a place where plates transition from smashing together to sliding past one another,” said Rich Briggs, a research geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Geologic Hazards Science Center. “It’s like a rock stuck in the track of a sliding glass door,” he said. “It just does not want to move smoothly because it’s got so many different forces on it.” ___ WHAT CAUSED THE MOST RECENT QUAKE? Saturday’s magnitude 7.2 earthquake likely occurred along the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone, which cuts across Haiti’s southwestern Tiburon Peninsula, according to the USGS.
