Word: chiles
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Fragile Crust. Geologically, Chile is in a mountain-building period, thrusting up the Andes Mountains over slow-moving heat currents in the solid layer beneath the earth's crust. When the heat currents flow evenly, the surface holds steady. When the currents vary, they put strains on the crust, which slips ponderously along lines of weakness called fault lines. The magnified result of such slips can be devastating to humans and their buildings on the earth's surface. Transferred to the sea, the giant push creates huge seismic waves...
Measured on the Richter scale, which counts any jolt over 7 as "major,"* the five biggest of Chile's shudders ranged between 7.25 and 8.5, striking along a fault line (see chart) that cuts through Chile's southern wheat-growing breadbasket and close to coal-mining, fishing and light-industrial towns...
Drowned Coastlines. Then, on seismic waves of deceptively quiet water, Chile's tragedy spread across the Pacific. Traveling as fast as 520 m.p.h. but separated as much as 100 miles from crest to crest, the waves met incoming ships so gently that they merely slowed them down. But when the waves hit land, they caused an unruly violence that varied according to the slope of a shore, the shelter of a peninsula or the degree of warning...
Some 28 hours after it left Chile, one wave formed a giant whirlpool off the Philippine island of Canarimes and swallowed nine fishermen along with their boat. An hour later the long east coast of Japan, 10,000 miles from Chile, went under. Warned by a sudden onrush of the sea, the fishermen of the coastal town of Kiritappu raced for high ground, then turned to watch the waves fling their boats into the streets behind them. The waterfront of Hilo, Hawaii was erased by 35 ft. waves...
Fight for Bread. Across the Pacific, heavy losses piled up: in the Philippines 20 dead and $150,000 damage;*in Hawaii 56 dead, 8 missing, $50 million damage; in Japan 107 dead, 86 missing. $50 million damage. And in Chile, where at week's end the earth still trembled, the death count climbed toward 5,000 and the damage toward $400 million...