The recent tragedy in Haiti exemplifies a growing problem in our world... a large population of people living in geologically active areas already straddled with staggering poverty.
By now, most of us have seen at least one video clip on the news depicting the geologic setting of Haiti, clinging to the edge of the Caribbean Plate, which is sliding east while the North American Plate slides west, known as a transform plate boundary. Each time there is motion along this plate boundary, potential energy stored in rock layers is released, producing an earthquake, in this case, approximately 6 mi below Haiti. Since the mag 7 earthquake rocked Port-au-Prince on 1/12/10, several aftershocks have shaken the small nation, the most recent of which occurred this morning, a magnitude 4.4 on the Richter scale. It is important to recognize that the Richter Scale is logrithamic, so a magnitude 7.0 earthquake is actually over 6000 times more energy than a mag 4.4. The USGS anticipates many aftershocks of this size over the coming months.
But Haiti exemplifies a global problem that is likely to get worse in the coming years. Many of the world's poorest countries around the globe are located along active plate boundaries and are ill-equipped to utilize more "earthquake safe" (and expensive) technology that allows much of California to successfully weather many an tremblor.
The UN named the Solomon Islands, located north of Australia and east of Papua New Guinea, one of the least developed countries in the world. The average annual per capita income is approximately $2900 USD. It was struck by a magnitude 8.1 earthquake in 2007, which in turn generated a tsunami estimated to be as much as 33' high, killing ~50 people and destroying nearly 1000 homes. Granted, the Solomon Islands have a relatively small population (about 500K) when compared to Haiti (>3M), but the threat is real for many developing nations.
The USGS has created a pretty cool program called PAGER (Prompt assessment of global earthquakes for response, found at http://earthquake.usgs.gov) which estimates the number of people and names of cities at risk after an earthquake has occurred. PAGER describes the Solomon Islands as a location where "the population lives in structures prone to earthquake shaking, though some resistant structures exist." An earthquake that struck this region 1/19/10 (mag 5.5) shook two small cities with a total population of ~60 k people.
So while the priority of international efforts must now be one of basic humanitarian aid to the Haitian people, perhaps in the future, instead of rebuilding grand palaces and tourist resorts, aid could be directed toward building homes able to resist some of the tremblors that will continue on into the foreseeable future.
