Haiti quake occurred in complex, active seismic region

From a news release issued by the Woods Hole Oceanogrphic Institution:

The magnitude 7.0 earthquake that triggered disastrous destruction and mounting death tolls in Haiti this week occurred in a highly complex tangle of tectonic faults near the intersection of the Caribbean and North American crustal plates, according to a quake expert at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) who has studied faults in the region and throughout the world.

Jian Lin, a WHOI senior scientist in geology and geophysics, said that even though the quake was “large but not huge,” there were three factors that made it particularly devastating: First, it was centered just 10 miles southwest of the capital city, Port au Prince; second, the quake was shallow—only about 10-15 kilometers below the land’s surface; third, and more importantly, many homes and buildings in the economically poor country were not built to withstand such a force and collapsed or crumbled.

All of these circumstances made the Jan. 12 earthquake a “worst-case scenario,” Lin said. Preliminary estimates of the death toll ranged from thousands to hundreds of thousands. “It should be a wake-up call for the entire Caribbean,” Lin said.