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...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 pockmarks left a dandruff-like ring of debris around the base, but after what seemed like hours, the police deemed the structure safe. The groom ducked inside as a limousine pulled up, and the bride moved like a brilliant white swan through the square. Her father waited in front of the police tape that lay crumpled...
While its increasingly affluent residents may wish to believe they have destiny in their grasp, Santiago - the economic jewel of South America - is perched on a stretch of earth that violently resists all efforts to tame it. Situated along the ring of fire, a hotbed of seismic activity that encircles the Pacific, the plates Chile sits on top of regularly unleash earthquakes of extremely high magnitude - more than a dozen major earthquakes since 1973. Richter can assign them a number, but it is difficult to describe how feverish and angry the earth feels here. The aftershocks this weekend have come...
Scientists still can't predict exactly when earthquakes will occur, but the massive temblor that struck off the coast of Chile early Saturday was anything but unexpected. Chile sits on the Ring of Fire, the volatile, 40,000 km-long (25,000 MILE) zone that encircles the Pacific Ocean and includes the most seismically dangerous ground on the planet. The unstable plate tectonics along the Ring produce some 90% of the world's earthquakes as well as most of its volcanic eruptions. (See where experts predict the next five major earthquakes will...
Because the Ring follows the coastlines of Pacific Ocean, almost any major quake can also produce a tsunami, a powerful wave that travels from the 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...
Temblors in the Ring of Fire are so common that a 7.0-magntitude quake hit Japan's Ryuku Islands yesterday. Today's Chilean quake occurred on one of the more powerful fault lines in the region, where the underwater Nazca Plate in the Pacific gradually submerges beneath the westward moving South American plate. The border between these two plates is known as a thrust fault, and the sudden rubbing of the plates against each other resulted in an earthquake that ripped across an estimated 400 miles of the fault. With a Richter scale magnitude of 8.8, the Chilean quake...