A magnitude-8.1 earthquake and tsunami that killed 192 people last year in Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga actually was a triple whammy: The 8.1 “great earthquake” concealed and triggered two magnitude-7.8 quakes.
California's San Andreas fault is notorious for repeatedly generating major earthquakes and for being on the brink of producing the next "big one" in a heavily populated area. But the famously violent fault also has quieter sections, where rocks easily slide against each other without giving rise to damaging quakes.
Study in Nature suggests that some mountains in "mobile belts" -- regions of crustal fragments, such as in the Mediterranean, the Rockies, and the Himalayas -- can rise due to upward pressure from the semi-liquid mantle. The study proposes a model for predicting uplift and likely volcanic hotspots in such regions.
Helen Sandkuhl, RN, MSN, CEN, FAEN, nursing director of Emergency Services at Saint Louis University Hospital shares her story about providing emergency medical care after the earthquake that left Haiti in ruins.
New research indicates that one of the largest fresh-water floods in Earth's history happened about 17,000 years ago and inundated a large area of Alaska that is now occupied in part by the city of Wasilla.
Students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are creating novel solar power systems to improve the situation of an impoverished Haitian school and jumpstart a new dairy industry in rural Peru.
Healthcare providers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) and other Texas Medical Center institutions helped many earthquake victims during a recent Haitian relief trip.
A series of major earthquakes have struck countries in the Caribbean, South America and Asia, causing catastrophic damage. Large-scale relief efforts are in place in the hardest-hit nations, including Haiti and Chile. Northeastern earth and environmental sciences professor Jennifer Cole discusses what causes earthquakes and how one natural disaster can lead to another.
After the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti left thousands of victims in its wake, nearly 20 members of the American Pediatric Surgical Association (APSA) put their lives on hold to travel to Haiti to help its youngest victims. With an estimated 40% of the population of Haiti being under the age of 18, many of the injured were children in need of specialized surgical care.
A team of geophysicists led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor Steven Roecker is in Chile to study the scope and strength of aftershocks that continue to rattle the area following the massive Feb. 27 8.8-magnitude earthquake. The 10-member team, which was assembled quickly from universities around the United States, will be putting in place more than 50 broadband seismometers throughout the impacted area in Chile.
Two months after the devastating earthquake hit Haiti, the needs of older adults in the region remain an urgent priority. Dr. Martin Gorbien, a geriatrician, and Lauren Kessler, a licensed clinical social worker, both from Rush University Medical Center, will be among the first older adult specialists to travel to Haiti to provide care at make-shift nursing homes.
Jeffrey Dragovich, a research structural engineer at NIST, has been deployed to Chile as a member of a large multidisciplinary team of experts documenting the effects of the Feb. 27, 2010, earthquake in that country.
In an essay published in this week’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, a Johns Hopkins emergency physician outlines how he and other physicians who worked in Haiti after the earthquake had to make emotionally difficult ethical decisions daily in the face of a crushing wave of patients and inadequate medical resources.
Three strong earthquakes rocked Chile this morning, just as the country was swearing in a new president. Expert Andrew Hynes of McGill University is available for interviews.
The massive magnitude 8.8 earthquake that struck the west coast of Chile last month moved the entire city of Concepcion at least 10 feet to the west, and shifted other parts of South America as far apart as the Falkland Islands and Fortaleza, Brazil. These preliminary measurements paint a much clearer picture of the power behind this temblor.
The Chilean earthquake hit just days before the landmark transition from outgoing President Michelle Bachelet to conservative President-elect Sebastian Piñera, and that is reopening old political fault lines that would better remain closed, says Peter M. Siavelis, director of Latin American Studies at Wake Forest University.
The 8.8-magnitude earthquake that hit Chile on Feb. 27 was many times more powerful than the one that struck Haiti two months ago, but Wake Forest University Professor of Political Science Peter Siavelis says Chile has many advantages as it begins its recovery efforts.
Virginia Tech Research Professor John Harrald testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee that the U.S. is vulnerable to catastrophic events. A shift in preparedness to the public sector is essential, he said.
IUPUI experts, researchers in geography, history, languages, and culture will discuss myths and misunderstandings about Haiti, the island nation’s environmental context and natural hazards; and the resources to help rebuild Haiti after the earthquake.
The 2008 earthquake in the Sichuan province of China was among the deadliest in history, killing an estimated 69,000 individuals and leaving millions displaced. Anesthesiologists are critically important medical responders to such disasters, as they have the skills required to resuscitate and stabilize patients while their injuries are surgically treated. The March issue of Anesthesia & Analgesia, official journal of the International Anesthesia Research Society (IARS), presents a remarkable account of the experience of anesthesiologists and health care responders to the Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan, China.
The massive, 8.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Chile Feb. 27 occurred in an offshore zone that was under increased stress caused by a 1960 quake of magnitude 9.5, according to geologist Jian Lin of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI).
University of Arkansas earthquake expert Brady Cox is available to answer questions about the effects of Saturday’s magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile, which has displaced 2 million people and destroyed or damaged hundreds of structures.
A surge in volunteers following a major disaster can overwhelm a response system, and without overall coordination, can actually make a situation worse instead of better .The outpouring of medical volunteers who responded to the devastating earthquake that rocked Haiti in January provides a roadmap for health care providers during future disasters, say the authors of a New England Journal of Medicine “Perspectives” piece that will be published online February 24.
A team of experts led by a UW civil engineer traveled to Haiti to evaluate the impact of the magnitude-7 earthquake. The report to the U.S. Geological Survey and the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute finds no surface evidence of the fault, but widespread damage related to poor building practices.
The case of the 10 American missionaries arrested on child trafficking charges in Haiti should serve as a wake up call for other U.S. congregations that are increasingly becoming involved in short-term mission work. “Missionary groups that are local and more independent, like the ones arrested in Haiti, are very vulnerable when doing service work in a foreign country, particularly in times of crisis” said Bill Leonard, dean of the Divinity School at Wake Forest University.
Ken Hover, Cornell professor of structural engineering, who has just returned from Haiti to inspect earthquake damage, will speak at a press conference on Wednesday, Feb. 3 at the World of Concrete convention in Las Vegas. The press conference, “Concrete and Masonry in the Recent Haitian Earthquake,” will be held in Room N253, at the Las Vegas Convention Center, at 3 p.m.
The Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing has been actively assisting Haitian nurses and midwives, gathering nursing education materials and making them available electronically.
Himself a wheelchair user, Rowan's Jay Chaskes is leading an effort to send durable, safe wheelchairs to adults and children injured in the Haitian earthquake.
Though professional journalists are taught to remain removed from and objective about the subject of their story, sometimes the events are so tragic it is impossible to maintain that distance. But a recent trend in news reporting, known as "emo-journalism," has taken understandably human responses to the next level. Former AP reporter Mike Lyons, Ph.D., assistant professor of English at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, Pa., discusses the trend.
Though professional journalists are taught to remain removed from and objective about the subject of their story, sometimes the events are so tragic it is impossible to maintain that distance. But a recent trend in news reporting, known as "emo-journalism," has taken understandably human responses to the next level. Former AP reporter Mike Lyons, Ph.D., assistant professor of English at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, Pa., discusses the trend.
An article published in yesterday's online issue of the New England Journal of Medicine describes the success and the challenges in medical care that doctors from the Weill Cornell affiliated GHESKIO clinic, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, are faced with following the devastating earthquake on Jan. 12.
Civil engineering professor and earthquake expert Brady Cox will travel to Haiti Saturday, Jan. 30, as part of a national team of engineers who will study the effects of the massive earthquake that struck the small Caribbean nation on Jan. 12. Cox and seven other members of Geo-engineering Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER), an organization funded by the National Science Foundation to conduct reconnaissance efforts of extreme events such as earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes, will gather data to advance understanding of earthquakes and their engineering effects.
In times of crisis, every thought and action becomes a means of answering a basic question: “How will I survive?” Patrick Samway, S.J., a Jesuit priest from Saint Joseph's University who annually travels to Haiti to work in orphanages, hospitals, schools and universities, says the Haitian people possess within themselves a resource to get them through the greater turmoil: an unwavering, unquestioning faith.
On Monday, January 25th “Penn Medicine Team One” – the first medical team from Penn Medicine to fly to Haiti - left from Philadelphia to provide expert medical care in Haiti.
The recent destruction in Haiti resulted from a huge earthquake near a susceptible population. The increased number of residents living in hazardous places around the world is the motivation behind a unique graduate program at Michigan Technological University.
Two days before the earthquake, Lora Iannotti, Ph.D., nutrition and public health expert from the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, traveled to Port-au-Prince and Leogane, Haiti, to continue her research about undernutrition and disease prevention in young children. The massive tremor changed her focus from research for the future to survival, with her team helping children in the aftermath of the quake. Iannotti says that there are some immediate actions that can be taken to prevent more lost lives and protect livelihoods.
A University of Arkansas researcher and his colleagues are traveling to Haiti as part of a National Science Foundation expedition to continue taking geologic measurements and better understand what happened, what is happening now, and what might yet occur.
Williams College political scientist Neil Roberts, who specializes in African-American and Caribbean thought and theories of freedom, is available for background interviews on Haiti.
“The physical terrain of Haiti simply cannot withstand this level of devastation, which compounds the deforestation and building infrastructural decay,” Robert’s wrote in a recent blog post (“Haiti and the Metaphysics of Disorder”).
After being locked for over 250 years, tectonic plates along the Enriquillo Plantain Garden Fault finally slipped free, triggering a massive earthquake, devastating the nation of Haiti.
A team from Sinai Hospital’s Rubin Institute for Advanced Orthopedics recently arrived in the Dominican Republic to treat Haitians injured in the earthquake. Team members include Shawn Standard, M.D., a pediatric orthopedic surgeon, Marie Gdalevitch, M.D., an orthopedic fellow and James Pepple, M.D., an anesthesiologist. This team is treating severely injured Haitians who have been transported out of field hospitals in Haiti to the more sophisticated CURE International Hospital in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
A University of Arkansas business researcher and logistics expert is monitoring Haiti relief efforts and says that despite important differences between commercial and humanitarian logistics, key applications of commercial logistics can be applied to the rapid-response phase of the disaster recovery operation.
Soon after receiving news of the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on Jan. 12, University President Timothy R. Lannon, S.J., sent a message to the SJU community outlining how to support the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere during this crisis. His message was informed by a conversation he had with another member of the Jesuit community.
The earthquake that hit Haiti on Jan. 12 has evoked emotions of sadness, grief and helplessness in many around the world. While adults may know how to express these feelings, often they do not know how to talk with children about the way the children are feeling.
Researchers at the Virginia Tech Center for Technology, Security, and Policy in the National Capital Region, doing a FEMA- funded study to determine the social impacts and disaster response requirements of a catastrophic earthquake on the New Madrid Seismic Zone, found that such a disaster would result in 80,000 injuries and 3,500 fatalities.
A team of anesthesiologists, nurses and orthopedic trauma surgeons from Hospital for Special Surgery headed for Haiti on Friday and have been performing surgery and tending to those impacted by the earthquake ever since.
Thomas D. O’Rourke is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. O’Rourke is a recognized authority on earthquake engineering and the impact on infrastructure.