Hispaniola Earthquake Essay

The island of Hispaniola, which contains Haiti on the western side and the Dominican republic on the Eastern side is found in the Caribbean sea near Cuba, and has a population of 10.3 million (Ferguson and Christian Girault, 2017). It is the poorest country in the Americas with an average GDP per capita of $846 US and 59% of the population living below the national poverty line of US $2.42 a day (“Haiti Overview,” 2017)
Haiti is located on a convergent boundary between the Caribbean and North American plates, with the Caribbean plate moving ENE at a rate of 18-20mm/yr (Cressey, 2010). The strike-slip earthquake occurred on 12th January 2010, 25km to the WSW of the capital Port Au Prince at a depth of 13km and had a magnitude of 7.0 Mw (“Magnitude
A total of 30,828 landslides were triggered from the earthquake with 29 700 000 m3 of dirt being displaced (Xu et al., 2014). The earthquake also trigged a tsunami, with waves reaching 3m in height that destroyed several buildings and killed 3 people (Dell’Amore et al., 2010). The tsunami was unexpected due to the type of earthquake that had occurred. The earthquake was a strike slip earthquake which means the plates slipped horizontally against one another, which normally wouldn’t cause a tsunami due to there being no vertical movement of the plates, which is needed to create tsunamis. A current theory for the cause of the tsunami is multiple underwater landslides (Lovett, 2010).
Although at the time of the 2010 Haiti earthquake there were no seismic monitoring stations (“The MW 7.0 Haiti Earthquake of January 12, 2010: USGS/EERI Advance Reconnaissance Team Report,” 2010, p. 0), there are now over 15 seismic monitoring stations operating in Haiti, creating the first ever national seismic network with the help of the United States Geological Survey (“Earthquake Monitoring in Haiti,”