As rescuers search for survivors in the Caribbean nation, here's a look at why Haiti has had so many devastating earthquakes over the centuries and why they are often so devastating.
The Earth's crust is made up of tectonic plates that move. And Haiti sits near the intersection of two of them the North American plate and the Caribbean plate.
"It's like a rock stuck in the track of a sliding glass door," he said. "It just does not want to move smoothly because it's got so many different forces on it."Saturday's magnitude 7.2 earthquake likely occurred along the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone, which cuts across Haiti's southwestern Tiburon Peninsula, according to the USGS.
"That friction builds up and builds up and eventually the strain that's stored there overcomes the friction," Hayes said. "And that's when the fault moves suddenly. That's what an earthquake is."It's a combination of factors that include a seismically active area, a dense population of 11 million people and buildings that are often designed to withstand hurricanes -- not earthquakes.
"I think it's important to recognize that there's no such thing as a natural disaster," said Wendy Bohon, a geologist with Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology. "What you have is a natural hazard that overlaps with a vulnerable system.""But we do know that earthquakes like this can cause similar-sized earthquakes on the next portion of the fault," said Hayes of USGS.
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