Haiti will suffer many new earthquakes

Scientists warned of a terrible earthquake in Haiti last week could be just the start of a series of strong earthquakes in the Caribbean region.

Haitian people walk on ruined streets in Port-au-Prince.Photo: Reuters .

According to Newcomer, milling lines (also called fault lines) caused an earthquake on January 13 that ran along the west and went through Jamaica. Paul Mann, a geophysicist at the University of Texas, said the milling line is a few hundred kilometers long but the section that caused the disaster in Haiti is only about 80 kilometers long. There are many other sections on the milling line that are accumulating pressure during the past hundred years. Any segment can cause earthquakes equivalent to the seismic last week

A second milling line begins in northern Haiti and runs through the Dominican Republic. This milling line has never broken in the past 800 years and has accumulated enough pressure to create a seismic 7.2 magnitude.

Many historical documents show that, every few centuries, these two milling lines cause strong earthquakes.

"Two milling lines are particularly dangerous because of the densely populated areas such as Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince and Jamaica's Kingston capital near them," Paul Mann told Newcomer.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited the ruins that used to be the United Nations headquarters in Haiti on January 17.Photo: Reuters.

The Caribbean region also has a third milling line to the east. This is also a factor that worries scientists. Unlike the other two milling lines, the third milling line is underwater and is created by the process of shifting the Atlantic's strata beneath the Caribbean strata. So the third milling line is the same as the milling line that caused earthquakes in the Indian Ocean and the terrible tsunami on December 26, 2004.

Satellite data show that the Caribbean tectonic plate is shifting eastward and slipping through the Atlantic tectonic plate at a rate of about 2 cm / year. Statistics over decades have shown that the total number of earthquake-like earthquakes on January 13 in Haiti only "consumes" about half the energy of this teleportation process.

Bill McGuire, a scientist at the University of London (UK), is concerned that much of the remaining power is accumulating on the underwater milling line. If that power is released, it can create a tsunami that has the same destructive power as the Indian Ocean tsunami. McGuire conducted a study to prove that the whole of the Caribbean, Central America, the northern coasts of South America and the coast of the southeastern US Gulf are at risk of suffering tsunamis.