Word: chiles
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bright, summery Saturday morning in Santiago, and at the Catedral Metropolitana de Santiago, the groom is becoming nervous. Less than 12 hours beforehand, the strongest earthquake to hit Chile in a generation rocked the capital, and all morning, local radio stations have carried news that although the city's modern structures emerged largely unscathed from the tremor, Santiago's sacred spaces did not fare as well. A few blocks away, the bell tower at Divina Providencia, a community church, had collapsed. But in the Plaza de Armas, the 18th century Catedral Metropolitana has held up much better. A few fresh...
...epicenter of the temblor across the ocean basin. That's what happened in 2004, when a 9.3-magnitude quake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra triggered a devastating tsunami, and that's is what's likely to happen following today's 8.8-magnitude quake off the coast of Chile. (See the latest photos of the earthquake in Chile...
...Chile, however, is no stranger to major earthquakes. In 1960, a 9.5-magnitude temblor - the strongest quake ever recorded by scientific instruments - hit the Chilean city of Valdivia, killing nearly 2,000 people. And although today's quake is the strongest in the last half-century to hit Chile, the country has had 13 quakes of 7.0 or higher on the Richter scale since 1973. That geologic history helps explain why building codes are far tougher in Chile than they are in Haiti, which should help limit the number of casualties from today's quake. So far, 147 people have...
Because the quake occurred offshore, however, the destruction likely won't be limited to Chile. As the underwater plates shake, they push the water above them up, creating the beginning of a wave, not unlike dropping a stone in a bathtub. The wave then travels away from the epicenter of the quake. In the case of the Chile temblor, the waves are moving in a northwest direction across the Pacific, putting nearly every shoreline along the ocean at some risk...
...waves travel at roughly the speed of a passenger jet, but because of the vast distance they are traveling across the Pacific from Chile's coast, vulnerable islands hours to prepare. That wasn't the case during the 2004 tsunami, which rippled across the much smaller Indian Ocean basin before there was time to raise a proper warning...