2010 HAITI EARTHQUAKE
Date: Tuesday, 12 January 2010
Place: Haiti, Dominican Republic
Magnitude: 7.0
Depth: 13 km
Place: Haiti, Dominican Republic
Magnitude: 7.0
Depth: 13 km
Earthquake means the movement of the inside earth and tectonic activity in the earth's interior. Especially for a long period of time, the energy accrues and releases in a moment. Some of the energy that accrues is propagating in all direction in a form of seismic waves. This energy reaches the surface; ground is shaking, and natural disasters are happens. Earth is surrounded by many plates. There is basically three parts in earth, crust, mantle and core. The mantle is under the crust, and they are semi-liquid. The semi-liquid mantle goes up when they get heated up by inner core and outer core, and then they go down again when they cool down. This is called convection currents. The mantle is moving because of this, so the plates that are floating on the mantle are bumping and moving each other. The area that plates are colliding is where many natural disasters occur, such as volcanoes and earthquakes. The Haiti earthquake had 7.0 magnitudes, 10km depth and it was recorded through the seismography. The borders between tectonic plates are called boundary or boundaries. There are three types of movements of boundary. Convergent boundary, Divergent boundary, and transform boundary. In Haiti earthquake, the Caribbean tectonic plate and North American plate were bumping (slip) together and then earthquake occurred. For Haiti earthquake, the type of plate tectonic movement is called transform boundary. The plates, Caribbean tectonic plate and North American plate were slipping against each other and it caused this earthquake. This happened in 10km depth so this was really powerful. Unlike other earthquake this earthquake wasn't predictable and it didn't take long for the earthquake to hit Haiti.