Can Hurricanes Trigger Earthquakes? | Wired Science | Wired.com: "Hurricanes and other storms are powerful agents of change of the Earth’s surface. In mere hours, storms can erode material from one area and deposit it somewhere else. In some cases, this sudden movement of sediment can completely transform a landscape. But can atmospheric forces trigger movements within the crust?
Earth scientist Shimon Wdowinski and his colleagues at the University of Miami presented an idea at the American Geophysical Union meeting last month linking the devastating Haiti earthquake in January 2010 to strong tropical storm systems that struck the region in 2008*.
The hypothesis put forth by Wdowinski and colleagues is that the mass of sediment removed from Haiti’s uplands (and deposited in adjacent lowlands) influenced the stresses on the Léogâne Fault zone enough to cause it to rupture, resulting in the devastating Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake. The cause of such rapid erosion, according to the abstract, was the combined effects of two hurricanes and two tropical storms in 2008 on a severely deforested landscape."
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
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