The 7.0 magnitude earthquake that flattened Haiti’s capital city last January may signal a new era of seismic activity in the Caribbean. According to geologists, the quake activated a fault system that had lain virtually dormant for at least 150 years.
Along with relief workers, geologists from the United States and Haiti raced to the quake’s epicenter, using gps devices to determine exactly how the land had moved. Their field surveys reveal that Hispaniola, Jamaica, and other islands in the Caribbean sit atop a network of interlocking faults far more complex than geologists had earlier understood, according to a series of papers published last October. Until then, scientists had assumed the Haiti earthquake involved a simple shift along the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone, a well-defined, 300-mile boundary between the North American and Caribbean plates.
The surveys suggest instead that the Haiti quake may have ruptured primarily along a previously unmapped ...
