© Ian Salas/epa/CorbisPeople walk by a destroyed road in Santiago, Chile after an earthquake of 8.8 on the Richter scale that hit the country early Feb. 27, 2010.
The magnitude-8.8 earthquake that pummeled Chile in February 2010 did not relieve seismic stress the way scientists thought it might have, a new study suggests.
Quake risk thus remains high in the region, geologist Stefano Lorito of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Rome and his colleagues report online Jan. 30 in
Nature Geoscience. In places, risk might even be higher than it was before last year's quake.
The geologic stress remains because instead of the ground moving the most where stress had been building the longest, the team reports, the greatest slip occurred where a different quake had already relieved stress just eight decades earlier.
Scientists would like to be able to point at a fault segment that built up stress the longest and say it was primed to go next. But the new work shows that stress buildup does not automatically translate to an earthquake happening right in that area, says geophysicist Ross Stein of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, who was not involved in the research. "It's a very logical approach," Stein says. "But I don't think it holds up."
