A salute to BBC‘s Jonathan Amos for moving fast on news of the terrible quake near Port Au Prince in Haiti. He seamlessly integrated sensitivity to the damage and casualty toll with technical information on building standards and the geological structures that spawned the temblor. Also blended nicely at the on line site are good-looking graphics attributed to the U.S. Geological Survey as their info source.

Rather than leave it to a brief link in Grist at the bottom of this post, it is worth highlighting USGS’s fast production of a podcast and interview with one of its lead scientists. The researcher rather vividly describes how two tectonic plates have caught and are “shearing…crushing…grinding” the island of Hispaniola, whose western end is Haiti, between them, popping off inevitable earthquakes. He provides concise, clear detail on the specific faults, their mechanics, and the shallowness of the rupture.

Other stories:

• AAAS ScienceNow: Richard A. Kerr: Haiti Quake Could Have Been Worse ; Kerr, going beyond the standard geology from USGS, finds a seismologist whose specialty is this region’s earthquakes. The fault that broke could have given way over a lot greater distance.
• New Scientist – Shanta Barley: Haiti’s earthquake was ‘long overdue’ ;
• Daily Mail: Haiti earthquake: Why was it so devastating? ;

We likely missed others – the news flow is gargantuan, most of it focussing naturally on the human toll and disaster relief, making reports that explain why it happened hard to find. I’ll add others as they come along. Tips via the “suggest stories” function are welcome, esp. those with links.

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 12:45 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.