0
With disasters striking Haiti, Chile and most recently Turkey, it seems like there is no end in sight for the earthquake-weary.
New evidence released from Ohio State University (OSU) shows that the 8.8-magnitude mega-quake that struck off the coast of Chile last month was so powerful that multiple South American cities were picked up and physically moved over from their original locations.
The effects of the temblor that struck Concepcion, Chile, were felt as far away, as Brazil and the Falkland Islands in what is believed to be the fifth largest quake ever recorded.
Here's the break down of the shake-up:
* Conception, Chile, shifted 10 feet to the west.
* Santiago, Chile’s capital, was displaced about 11 inches to the west-southwest.
* Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, moved about 1 inch to the west.
And Buenos Aires sits on the other side of the continent!
The cities of Valparaiso and Mendoza, Argentina, northeast of Concepcion, also showed significant movement.So how do you measure how an entire city moves?
Researchers from four universities and several agencies -- including geophysicists on the ground in Chile -- gathered readings at 25 GPS locator stations set up prior to the major quake and then compared them to readings taken 10 days later to come up with their preliminary numbers.
The measuring project is called Project CAP: Central and Southern Andes GPS Project.
Dr. Ben Brooks, an associate researcher with the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii and co-principal investigator on the project, worked with a team of researchers from OSU, University of Memphis and several others to analyze the data.
"The GPS stations are located on stable monuments at various places in Chile, Argentina, and surrounding countries," Brooks told Discovery News in an email. "Each place is different but the OSU/UHawaii/Memphis group always tries to place its monuments in rock or very deeply anchored tripods to insure we are measuring crustal movement and not just local displacements."
Source
