Amazing Plate Movement and Other Interesting Facts!

Some of the statistics about the big 8.8 earthquake and the plate movement associated with it are incredible. The city of Concepcion moved about 10 FEET to the west. Santiago (240 miles from the epicenter) moved 11 INCHES SSW and Buenos Aires, Brazil which is more than 1100 km (approx. 700 miles ) from the epicenter moved an INCH. For a great map of these movements, click on this map by researchers at the University of Hawaii. For more info, see the article in Science Daily.

This quake also slowed the earth's rotation on its axis and may have tipped the axis. See this article for an explanation and the numbers. The power of earth's processes is truly incredible, but then that is why Chile has such spectacular scenery - the high Andes mountain peaks, azure glacial lakes, snow-covered symmetrical volcanoes, deep fjords in the south, high desert plateaus in the north, majestic sea cliffs, etc.

To put the power of the 8.8 quake in perspective: at 15.8 gigatons of energy, it was 500,000 times bigger than the Nagasaki atom bomb (31.6 kiloton), 500 times bigger than the 2010 Haiti quake (31.6 megatons), 16 times bigger than the 1906 San Francisco quake (1 gigaton) (thankfully everyone has learned a lot about construction since then!), and 11 times smaller than the 1960 Valdivia, Chile quake (178 gigatons) which released about 20% of the earth's energy in the last 100 years. For some interesting comparative charts including one of the damage caused by earthquakes of various magnitudes, to Wikipedia's article on the Richter scale.