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, geophysicist Stefano Lorito of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Rome and his colleagues report online January 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.