On August 14, a powerful magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck Haiti, triggering landslides, toppling buildings and killing at least 1,900 people, with over 9,000 people injured. Rescue workers are racing against time to find survivors in the rubble, hampered by heavy rains from Tropical Storm Grace that battered and flooded the country’s southern peninsula on August 16.
Scientists, too, are rushing to the region to learn what they can from the devastation the quake left behind, in hopes of gaining a better understanding of the seismic hazards faced by the country.
The epicenter of the quake was near Petit Trou de Nippes, a town on Haiti’s southern peninsula about 125 kilometers west of Port-au-Prince. The Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone passes straight through that peninsula, marking where the Caribbean tectonic plate to the south grinds against the small Gonâve tectonic plate to the north. Scientists often eye this fault zone as the likely source when a deadly quake strikes Haiti, such as the 2010 earthquake that killed at least 200,000 people (SN: 1/16/10).
But several months after that quake, scientists discovered that its origin was on a previously unknown fault, near but not part of the well-known Enriquillo zone (SN: 8/11/10). The fault was within a region of faults not mapped before, in part due to a dearth of seismometers in Haiti. Since then, researchers have worked to increase seismic measurements and understanding of the country’s seismic hazards, including through the creation of a network of volunteer “citizen seismologists.” Data collected by those volunteers have already proved invaluable to tracking the most recent quake and its aftershocks, says geologist Dominique Boisson of the University of Haiti in Port-au-Prince.