The Pacific ‘Ring of
Fire’ has been angry over the past day, producing five strong
earthquakes over a 48 hour period- not counting the 5.9 quake
which struck Papua New Guinea.
North-central Chile was the first to feel
the Ring’s wrath, as a magnitude 6.8 quake went off at about 3:15 p.m. EST,
centred roughly 40 km north of Vallenar, the capital city of Chile’s Huasco
Province. Reports say that it shook buildings as far away as Santiago, nearly
600 kms to the south, and closer to the epicenter; some buildings in
lower-income areas of Vallenar suffered collapsed walls. According to a Reuters
report, one unfortunate woman died shortly after the quake, of an apparent
heart attack.
The Solomon Islands (Santa Cruz), in the south Pacific, were
next, as three strong earthquakes, registering as magnitude 6.0 and 6.2 on the
Richter Scale, struck just east of the island of Nuendö at 6:03 p.m. EST. No
reports of any damage or injuries from either of these earthquakes as of yet,
however the area is sparsely populated, with Lata, a community of just over 550
residents at the northwestern end of Nuendö, being the closest settlement to
the quake epicenter of magnitude 6.0 earthquake off the southern coast of
Alaska.
Finally, this morning, at 4:53 a.m. EST, a magnitude 6.0 earthquake
shook an already battered region along the southern tip of Alaska. The Alaskan
Earthquake Center is apparently reporting that today’s tremor is an aftershock
of the magnitude 7.5 quake that shook this same area on January 5th, and it is
just north of where a magnitude 7.7 earthquake shook Haida Gwaii (the Queen
Charlotte Islands) in October of last year. No damage or injuries have been
reported from this latest quake.
Although earthquakes around the ‘Ring of Fire’
have been known to touch off tsunamis, no alerts were sounded as a result of
any of these four events.
These earthquakes occurring in relatively quick
succession, separated by distances of thousands of kilometers, punctuates just
how active the ‘Ring of Fire’ is and just how unpredictable it can be. Although
efforts are being made to put early warning systems into place, true earthquake
prediction remains a lofty goal.
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