Small tremor could have triggered big Chilean quake
On April 1, 2014, a magnitude-8.2 earthquake shook the empty stretch of coast where Chile arcs into Peru, a region called the Iquique Gap. The gap is the only part of the 7,000 kilometer-long boundary between the Nazca and South American plates that hadn’t ruptured in the past century, despite a collision rate of almost 65 millimeters per year.
Full content for EARTH is available to subscribers. If you would like to gain access to the full version of this article, as well as all EARTH content, please subscribe today.
If you are connecting using a Library (IP-based) Subscription, please access full issues of the magazine through our Library Access portal.
Julia Rosen
Rosen holds a doctorate in geology and is a freelance science writer based in Portland, Ore. She has served as both an intern and an interim staff writer for EARTH, has also written for the Los Angeles Times and AGU’s Eos, and occasionally hosts 60-Second Science podcasts for Scientific American. Find more of her work at www.julia-rosen.com.
Saturday, April 11, 2015 - 06:00
Did you know ...
The digital edition of EARTH Magazine is a free subscription for members of AGI's Member Societies. Find out more!
EARTH only uses professional science journalists and scientists to author our content? In this era of fake news and click-bait, EARTH offers factual and researched journalism. But EARTH is a non-profit magazine, and at least 10 times more people read EARTH than pay for it. As advertising revenues across the media decline, we need your help to ensure that we can continue bringing you the reliable and well-written coverage of earth science you know and love. Our goal is not only to inform our readers, but to inform decision makers across the economic and political spectrum about the science of our planet. So, we need your help. By becoming a subscriber or making a tax-deductible contribution to support EARTH, you can fund our writers and help make sure the world knows about our planet.
