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Earth and environment professor Grenville Draper says it was only a matter of time before the region experienced a major earthquake.
By Karen Cochrane
Tuesday’s devastating earthquake in Haiti occurred on the Plantain Garden-Enriquillo Fault zone. While many of us can identify by name the San Andreas Fault zone that runs through California, few of us even knew about the existence of the Plantain Garden-Enriquillo Fault zone prior to the Jan. 12 catastrophe. Not Grenville Draper, a professor in FIU’s Department of Earth and Environment. He knows the fault that stretches between Jamaica in the west to central Hispaniola in the east well. The 31-year FIU faculty member has studied the geology tectonics of the Greater Antilles, including Haiti, for more than 30 years and actually mapped the western extent of this fault while working on his doctorate. He returned recently from a trip to the region.
The Plantain Garden-Enriquillo Fault zone, like the San Andreas Fault zone, is a strike-slip fault, meaning that the motions on the fault are horizontal rather than vertical. Unlike the San Andreas, it is not the main fault between two plates (Caribbean and North America) but a subsidiary one. The rate of accumulation of strain in the area is very slow, according to Draper, who says that explains why it had been more than 200 years between major earthquakes in Haiti. The energy that had been building up from the friction was released as seismic waves, causing the earthquake.
Draper, who is chair of the Standing Committee of the Caribbean Geological Conference series and a member of the editorial boards of International Geology Review and Geologica Acta, spent a few minutes with the newsarchives.fiu.edu team to talk about the earthquake and where the next big one in the region might strike.
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Good explanation, should be disseminated more widely (like this You Tube broadcast).