Writing for the Mother Nature Network, Bryan Nelson discusses how environmental damage and climate change could have contributed to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti:
If you ever doubted that human action was capable of profoundly effecting the Earth’s ecology, consider this: Scientists now believe that our mismanagement of the environment is quite literally causing the Earth to shake.
New research has confirmed a correlative link between the occurrence of major earthquake events, such as the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and rapid soil erosion caused by deforestation and man-made climate change, reports the Independent.
The idea that the weather plays a role in triggering earthquakes is highly controversial, and scientists have largely discounted previous attempts to establish a link between earthquakes and changes in atmospheric pressure, such as what happens during typhoons and hurricanes. But a new study, recently presented at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, takes a different angle. It looks at how changes to the weight of soil bearing down on faultlines might serve to release geological stress.
“Very wet rain events are the trigger. The heavy rain induces thousands of landslides and severe erosion, which removes ground material from the Earth’s surface, releasing the stress and encouraging movement along faults,” said Shimon Wdowinski of the University of Miami in Florida.
The 2010 earthquake in Haiti serves as a particularly telling example, since Haiti sits right along the path of frequent hurricanes in the Caribbean Sea. The nation also suffers from extreme deforestation, which is also a leading cause of soil erosion.
“The 2010 earthquake in Haiti occurred… 18 months after the same area was hit by two tropical storms and two hurricanes,” said Wdowinski.
Read more in Nelson’s full article Could the earthquake in Haiti have been a man-made disaster? and, from the UK’s Independent newspaper, Why the Haiti earthquake may not have been a natural disaster .
[Photo: International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies]
