Would an early warning system have helped? Possibly, but because we weren’t expecting this kind of tsunami, even if a network of buoys had been functional, they wouldn’t have been in the right place because the tsunami was so local. 11 photo, rescue workers watch as a heavy machine digs through rubble searching for earthquake victims at Balaroa neighborhood in Palu, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia (photo by Dita Alangkara/Associated Press) Instead, the tsunami may have been a secondary effect – the earthquake triggered an underwater landslide, and the landslide triggered the tsunami. They usually occur by changing the shape of the ocean floor during the earthquake.īut the Sulawesi earthquake didn’t happen under water. Tsunamis are devastating – inescapable and nearly unsurvivable if you’re in their path. ![]() ![]() So far, about 2,100 deaths have been reported, but the number continues to rise. The real killer, and the surprise, was the tsunami. 28 in Sulawesi, Indonesia? The magnitude 7.5 quake was large, but not giant. 26, 2004, generating the Boxing Day tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people, an international effort ramped up deployment of a warning system of buoys in the Indian Ocean. And countries throughout the Pacific now know they can be hit anytime by a tsunami originating from Chile or any other number of locations.Īfter the devastating earthquake that struck off the coast of Sumatra on Dec. The earthquake in Haiti happened on what is called a blind fault, meaning it was buried, so we didn’t know it existed. Haiti didn’t have the resources to adequately prepare or respond.Īnother difference is expectation. It also has the building codes to show for it. The largest ever recorded, a magnitude 9.5, struck in 1960. Nothing makes a bigger difference in an earthquake’s death toll than infrastructure, especially when population is dense. Or a cholera outbreak that follows from the lack of clean drinking water. The classic saying among geologists is that earthquakes don’t kill people – buildings do. So why was the Haiti earthquake so devastating? Blind fault In the world of logarithmic scaling, that means the one in Chile was 500 times more powerful. No one knows for sure how many died: 160,000? 220,000? But this earthquake was only a magnitude 7.0. 14, 2010 photo, a couple looks over hundreds of earthquake victims at the morgue in Port-au-Prince (photo byGregory Bull/Associated Press) ![]() ![]() That one you definitely remember because it was awful, and you and countless others donated to the rescue and recovery effort. Yet relatively few people, 550, died in this earthquake, 150 of those in the resulting tsunami, and it hasn’t lingered in the public awareness.Ĭompare it to what happened in Haiti just a month earlier, on Jan. The tsunami it generated caused damage as far away as Japan. It caused three minutes of intense shaking in Chile and Argentina. It was the sixth largest ever recorded, with a magnitude of 8.8. Take, for example, the biggest earthquake you’ve never heard of. What matters more is what country you live in and how close you are to water. The answer depends less on the magnitude of the earthquake than you’d think.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |