Last week we told you that the massive 8.8-magnitude earthquake that struck in Chile on Feb. 27 — the fifth largest ever recorded by seismographs — actually shortened our days by a smidge.
Well, this week, scientists at Ohio State University and University of Hawaii have been able to determine that the city most affected by the quake, Concepcion, shifted 10 feet to the west, according to Wired Magazine. Chile’s capital, Santiago, also moved just under a foot to the west and even Buenos Aires in Argentina, which is 800 miles from the epicenter of the quake, moved over an inch.
“The Maule earthquake [in Chile] will arguably become one of the, if not the most important great earthquake yet studied,” said project scientist Ben Brooks of the University of Hawaii in a press release. “We now have modern, precise instruments to evaluate this event, and because the site abuts a continent, we will be able to obtain dense spatial sampling of the changes it caused.”
Ohio State scientists have been using GPS to record movements of the crust on Chile since 1993. The largest quake ever recorded (magnitude 9.5) happened in 1960 in Chile not too far from February’s earthquake. The area is an active “subduction zone,” where an oceanic plate is colliding with a continental plate and being pushed into the earth’s molten mantle below.
The Sumatra quake in 2004 that created the tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people was the third largest quake ever, at 9.1 magnitude.
Scientists say it’s not unusual for massive quakes to shift land masses.
Photo courtesy of Pablo/T via Flickr.
