A.D. August 14: Earthquake shakes Haiti 7.2. The largest earthquake in the region since 2010 has killed at least 2,000 people, injured 12,000, and destroyed nearly 53,000 homes. Two assistant professors at MIT Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science explain why the region is vulnerable to earthquakes and what has changed – in Haiti and Earthquake Science – since the catastrophic 2010 disaster. When the country has only one earthquake.
Camila Catania is a psychologist with experience in numerical modeling, earthquake physics and earthquake statistics. And William Frank, a geophysician‘s shell.
Q: Why is Haiti vulnerable to earthquakes?
Catania: I’ll start with a wide range of technologies. The island of Hispania, which includes Haiti and the Dominican Republic, is stuck between the North American plateau and the North and South Caribbean plate. Haiti is primarily on a small plate between the two. Defects that run approximately east to west on each flat boundary are broken in the crust. The quake struck in the southernmost part of the country, in what is known as the “Enriculo-Plane Garden Failure”, creating complex error geometry with slightly different directional defects. As the northern plateau moves westward, the southern plateau moves eastward, causing an earthquake in this disaster zone.
Frank: The sliding movement is not only from east to west, but you also have a reference or compression movement on the flat surface that is handled by other errors nearby. For example, one of the big questions for the 2010 earthquake was: What damage did it actually do? It looked like Enriklo-Planen’s garden destruction system, but was it in interpretation, or was it a slippery, slippery, slippery slope? From a distance, there are many intriguing questions about the seemingly simple complexity.
Catania: The region shifts from the horizontal movement to the horizontal movement described by William in some horizontal movement. Even in this earthquake, the first models show that they were both small.
Another question – why now? Why two recent earthquakes? The Enriquillo-Plantain Garden error system was associated with earthquakes in 1751, 1770, and 1860, with little to no earthquake. Earthquakes can increase the likelihood of long-term seizures because they have more time to store stress. In addition, the 2010 earthquake, which was caused by a subterranean earthquake, further increased the tension at the site of the 2021 earthquake.
Q: What is this earthquake similar to and different from the 2010 earthquake?
Frank: The 2010 earthquake was the result of an unprecedented catastrophe, which was one of the catastrophic floods that hit the plateau. The question now is whether this recent earthquake is due to a major translation error, or to another error that handles compression activity. If so, it was the same flat border, but a different guilty regime.
Catania: There are many unknowns because this region was used very rarely in the absence of Haiti’s permanent earthquake network until 2010. The region now has many earthquakes, and people have mobile and low-quality earthquakes in their homes that provide many measurements. The quality of the information obtained from this earthquake is superior to anything we had in 2010 or earlier. Between these two events, the tool has been improved because I think we will have more answers to some of the questions we have asked in the past.
Frank: Increased equipment allows us to get a better picture of what is happening in the damaged zone during the main earthquake and subsequent earthquakes. The parallel story of why it is possible There was no earthquake at Haiti State University during the 2010 earthquake. Currently, there is a geoscience unit that trains earthquake experts.
he said Information website That was the result of an exciting collaboration between geoscientists in Haiti and the University of Nice in France, where they identified instantaneous earthquakes and locations. Provides a huge amount of data available publicly. Overall, during the 2010 earthquake, there was much activity in Haiti, equipment, earthquake risk, and a lot of people studying the data.
Catania: Another difference between these events is their size. The first was 7; This was the latest 7.2. But the place was also different: the first was close to Port-au-Prince and the densely populated areas in general. Being stronger does not necessarily mean more harm.
Q: What does your earthquake research tell us about this area? What do we know as a scientific community?
Catania: We cannot predict the magnitude or magnitude of earthquakes in this area, or anywhere else; However, we know the typical characteristics of earthquakes. Basically, you will feel hundreds of earthquakes in the first few weeks, and then that number will gradually come down unless one of these earthquakes is enough to start a new sequence.
How does an earthquake affect the fault system? A.D. We had an earthquake east of the current quake in 2010 and the magnitude of the 2021 earthquake has increased. If you look at the map of this area, it is clear that there are other parts of this same fault system where major earthquakes have not been seen for a long time. Other catastrophic earthquakes are likely to occur during the same catastrophe.
Frank: For me, the most relevant part of my research is developing effective ways to identify, identify, and identify earthquakes. We have developed signal processing techniques that can be used on seismic data to detect earthquakes, and once we can identify them, we can find good locations. We were able to study the magnitude of these earthquakes.
These earthquake catalogs are extremely important to understand the magnitude of the damage and to identify the exact faults and planes that occur. There are two simple ways to identify the structure. You can usually see the main quake itself or the main earthquake zone where the main earthquake is located. And once you can identify, find, and identify those earthquakes, you can better shape the earthquake.
Catania: My job was to include geometric complexity in earthquake forecasts. When trying to find out where an earthquake occurs, you need to know as much as possible about the location of existing faults, and sometimes make simple assumptions about it. To understand what the error geometry looks like and how volatile it is in this region, I have developed a method to better incorporate everything we know, data, and what William described. My methods allow you to get more accurate information about earthquake geometry to produce better earthquake forecasts.
Frank: That’s why I’m happy to be here with Camilla – because we can have that direct relationship.
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