The Paw Print

Thousands left homeless after earthquakes

by Kathy

The horrifying pictures of motionless bodies, injured citizens, crying parents and dirtied orphans from the recent earthquake still sends chills. The February 27 Chilean earthquake recorded a magnitude of 8.8 on the Richter scale and lasted four full minutes.

The Haiti earthquake had a magnitude of 7.0. The Chilean earthquake was 500 times more forceful than Haiti’s, but killed less people. Why did the Haiti earthquake kill over 200,000 people, while the Chile’s earthquake killed about 600 people?

The apocalypse is not coming, nor is 2012 really the end. The actual answers are tectonics and poverty. Tectonics is the process by which mountains move and rocks squeeze and crunch.

Off the coast of Chile is a tectonic plate called the Nazca plate. The Nazca plate has slowly been inching its way towards the South American plate, for over a hundred million years. But the Nazca plate doesn’t fit perfectly under the South American plate like a puzzle. The movements of the two plates are irregular, and can get stuck for hundreds of years. When the plates finally do slip, they release energy. All that squeezed energy is released in seconds and can cause huge earthquakes. On February 27 a patch of the plate, the size of Maryland, slipped.

Tectonic squeezing has also formed the Andes, the Rockies and the Himalayas. It created and distorted some of the Caribbean islands, including Haiti. So, the two earthquakes are not related.

Poverty plays a major part in the death toll. Poverty means that little thought is made of seismic risk during the construction of buildings. This means that what’s cheap gets the job done. Haiti is a tragic example of this. Weak building materials attributed to Haiti’s massive death toll.

Even though Haiti’s death toll was greater than Chile’s earthquake, the latter quake altered the world forever. Scientists say that the huge quake shortened the days by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second). This means that a day on Earth is not an exact twenty four hours. This change is negligible, but permanent. Earth’s rotation on its axis causes day and night. After Chile’s earthquake the Earth’s axis moved by 8 centimeters or 3 inches.

Not only were our days shortened, but cities moved. The capital of Chile, Santiago, moved almost 24 centimeters or 10 inches west. Buenos Aires, a city in Argentina and nearly 800 miles away from the epicenter, shifted 3.9 centimeters or 1.5 inches.

The aftershocks of the Chile earthquake have been deadly. They range from 5.4 to 7.2 magnitudes. Weeks after the quake in Chile, on March 11 a 7.2 aftershock struck this South American country. The reverberation had a greater magnitude than the Haiti earthquake. Millions are homeless, thousands missing and hundreds of children are orphaned.

“One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic,” Joseph Stalin once said.

With families separated, millions injured, but not with nearly enough supplies, Haiti and Chile are suffering. While donating might seem a long complicated ordeal, it’s actually very simple. Just a couple of texts could feed a hungry orphan. To help the people of Haiti and Chile think about a donation of this sort. In addition to a monetary donation through charities, standard text messaging can help. Note standard text fees may apply

World Vision: Text CHILE to 20222
American Red Cross: Text HAITI to 90999