© 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."
Comment: I've just remembered that a similar event was filmed in Kazakhstan last year:
Note the date: June 30th, the anniversary of the 1908 Tunguska cometary explosion over remote Siberia.
Our Connecting the Dots series discussed this other Kazakhstan event last summer.
Now, most Internet buzz seemed to connect this with the UFO that shut down Xiaoshan airport in the Chinese city of Hangzhou on the same night. In fact, the two events were generally confused as being one and the same. Here's a photo of the UFO over Hangzhou:
...but cometary fragments have been reported throughout history of performing 'unnatural' maneuvers themselves, sometimes slowing almost to a halt as they put on their show for us.
You have to wonder about spectacular mass 'UFO sightings' occurring at precisely the same times as these infinitely weirder visions entering or skirting our atmosphere.
Can we say "Cosmic COINTELPRO"?