UPDATED (21:00 Eastern): A magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti just ten miles from the country's capital city, Port-au-Prince, this evening.
This is a strong one, folks, and its proximity to a major population center in an impoverished nation doesn't bode well. In 2005, the World Bank ranked Haiti as one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to natural disasters.
Already reports are trickling in indicating that a hospital in the capital has collapsed. CNN is reporting widespread damage throughout the city, including major damage to the presidential palace. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) has issued a tsunami 'watch message' -- they can't issue official alerts to other countries, but they've put the Caribbean region on notice.
It's too soon to say much more until better information is available, but preliminary exposure maps from the Untied States Geological Survey suggest 2-3 million people live in the area where the most violent shaking was expected. Most of those -- around 1.3 million people -- live in Port-au-Prince, but the strongest shaking is likely to have concentrated in Carrefour, a town of 443,000 south of the capital that is basically right on top of the epicenter (apologies for bad map quality below).
The only good news so far is that a widespread tsunami is unlikely, according to NOAA. Most of the predicted arrival times for a destructive wave have now passed, so the threat from the sea is low. However, reports of aftershocks in the magnitude 5.5 range are already coming in, and the lack of reported casualties so far means almost nothing. It's going to be a while before we know the extent of devastation.
UPDATE: Jian Lin, a geologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute told Discovery News that he and colleagues expect "significant damage to property and significant casualties" owing to poor building standards in Haiti.
"It's not the earthquakes which kill people," he said. "It's the collapsing buildings which kill people."
The quake occurred along the Enriquillo-Plaintain Garden fault zone, he added, which runs in an East-West direction along the southern edge of the island of Hispaniola (which includes Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and into the Caribbean Sea for several hundred miles.
Worryingly, the island is riddled with shorter faults that run parallel to the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden. Lin said that geologists are concerned that this evening's quake could trigger additional tremors of magnitude 6.0 or greater along one of those faults in the near future.
For real time images from the scene of the quake in Haiti, click here (be advised: these are powerful images of an unfolding disaster).
Tags: Earthquakes, Geology, Geophysics, Natural Disasters
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