Word: faults
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...Much of the fault of the financial crisis has been heaped on Wall Streeters, unscrupulous mortgage lenders and weak regulators. But in a new research paper, economist Ricardo Caballero says there is another major group of contributors to America's monetary mess who are not getting the blame they deserve: foreigners...
...earthquake ought to have been predictable, it was the one that just struck. Haiti sits over two clashing tectonic plates, the North American and the Caribbean, which form what's known as the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault. Geologists know the fault well and have studied it for decades, and well they should: it has shaken the region violently and repeatedly over history, though yesterday's quake, measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale, is the worst in a century. (See pictures of the devastating earthquake in Haiti...
Monitoring zones like this around the world to get a general sense of where the next such pops may happen is not that difficult, mostly because tectonic activity is hard to conceal completely. There are three types of quakes: the dip-slip fault (in which one clashing plate slides under the other), the reverse dip-slip (in which they pull apart) and the strike-slip (a sideways grinding of the plates). Haiti's quake was a strike-slip, but all three varieties are preceded by years or centuries of accumulated stress, in which the slowly drifting slabs of planet...
...things generally about earthquakes," says Blanpied. "We look at faults and patterns of quakes over many years and say where on the landscape they're likeliest to occur next. This forecasting is usually in the long term." Indeed, scientists predicted as recently as 2008 that a fault zone on the south side of Haiti's island of Hispaniola posed a "major seismic hazard...
...1980s, for example, the USGS partnered with the state of California to study a particularly unstable stretch of the San Andreas fault near the town of Parkfield. Quakes had been occurring in the area every 20 to 25 years or so. The previous one had been in 1966, so scientists predicted another should hit before 1990. They threaded the region with seismometers and other sensors, then sat back and waited for the telltale signal that would give them notice of the coming rumble. The quake never occurred in the 1980s, nor in the 1990s. It was not until 2004 that...