Haiti Braces for Future Quakes

Posted on Oct 31, 2010

AP / Gregory Bull

Haiti is still reeling from devastation caused by January’s horrific earthquake.

From earthquakes to cholera, Haiti can’t seem to get a break. Geologists have now reported that the decimated country may be in serious risk of additional devastation. Scientists posit that “not all the geological strain that triggered the original quake” last Jan. 12 has been released. —JCL

The Guardian:

Haiti is at serious risk of further devastation from earthquakes in the near future, geologists have warned. Their research, to be published in next month’s issue of Nature Geoscience, indicates that not all the geological strain that triggered the original quake in January has been released as had been thought.

More than 230,000 people died in the magnitude 7.0 quake on 12 January and more than one million were left homeless. Now geologists are warning that Haiti faces the prospect of further devastation.

“The January earthquake only unloaded a fraction of the seismic energy that has built up over time in Haiti,” Eric Calais, a geologist at Purdue University, Indiana, who is also a science adviser for the UN development programme in Haiti, told Nature. “Other earthquakes are therefore inevitable.”

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