© Thony Belizaire/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesA day after the earthquake, a young woman climbs over shopping carts and the rubble of a collapsed store on January 13, 2010 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Last week, on the morning of Nov. 11, a tremor shook the Port-au-Prince suburb of Carrefour. It was a minor geological event, but given the still fresh and haunting memories of the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that hammered Haiti on Jan. 12 and killed some 230,000 people - many of them in Carrefour - even that mild shudder caused public panic. The only reported injuries, in fact, were due to people scrambling to take cover.
To geologists, it's good to see Haitians on such heightened alert. Most scientists believe the western hemisphere's poorest country is hardly out of the seismic woods - and after studying the Haiti quake data for the past 10 months, they're more convinced than ever that Haitians can expect another major quake sooner rather than later. That's largely because they've found, according to a new study by 10 prominent geologists, that the lion's share of the January temblor occurred not along the fault line they originally suspected, known as the Enriquillo - Plantain Garden fault zone, but on a previously unknown fault. (Faults separate plates in the earth's crust, which cause quakes when stress makes them collide.) As a result, says Falk Amelung, a University of Miami geologist and one of the report's authors, "the prospects of another serious event may be rather worse than we first thought."
When Amelung and other geologists started poring over information from the earthquake's satellite-radar images last January, they were flummoxed by a variety of features. One was the vertical motion the quake exhibited - unusual because the Enriquillo, which runs across Haiti's southern peninsula just below Port-au-Prince, is a strike-slip fault, the kind that almost exclusively displays horizontal motion when it ruptures. At the same time, the quake's horizontal movement was partly north-south, another anomaly for a strike-slip fault. "Those were the two important smoking guns" that made scientists question their early assumptions about the quake, says Eric Calais, a Purdue University geologist who is in Haiti as a science adviser to the U.N. Development Program and is a lead author of the study, which was published last month in
Nature Geoscience.(
See more about the January earthquake that devastated Haiti.)
Comment: Looks like Europe is in for trouble weather-wise. Next weekend, freezing temps, snow and maybe even storms at the same time. The Jet stream appears to have stopped or broken down over Europe. Check out this image:
Here's an image from the US earlier this year:
Here's an article with a video explaining what happened in India, Russia and China this year as a result of a similar strange break down/up of the Jet Stream (ignore the 'global warming' nonsense).
Russian Drought, Pakistan Floods, Chinese Landslides All Linked To Bizarre Jet Stream Change