Huge Ring of Fire earthquake ‘SHAKES buildings’ in El Salvador
A HUGE earthquake shook buildings in El Salvador late on Saturday evening, a witness in the Central American country reported.
By THOMAS HUNT
Express.co.uk
Sun, Mar 4, 2018
The quake had a 5.1 magnitude, according to a preliminary estimate given by El Salvador’s Natural Resources and Environmental Ministry.
The earthquake struck at 5:01 UTC and witnesses have reported indoor objects visibly shaking.
There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage.
The “Ring of Fire”, also called the Circum-Pacific belt, is the zone of earthquakes surrounding the Pacific Ocean- about 90 per cent of the world’s earthquakes occur there.
The next most seismic region (5-6 per cent of earthquakes) is the Alpide belt (extends from Mediterranean region, eastward through Turkey, Iran, and northern India.
Scientists in California have analysed 101 major earthquakes around the Pacific Ring of Fire, a horseshoe-shaped geological disaster zone, between 1990 and 2016.
They believe a cluster of tremors around the area could indicate a “big one” is due to hit.
Earthquakes have already struck in Japan, Taiwan, Guam and Indonesia in the past few weeks.
Thorne Lay, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, said: “Based on the clustering of earthquakes in space and time, the area that has just slipped is actually more likely to have another failure.”
He added that “the surrounding areas have been pushed towards failure in many cases, giving rise to aftershocks and the possibility of an adjacent large rupture sooner rather than later.”
Mr Lay said: “Taiwan, Guam and Japan are far apart relative to the static stress interactions, but one could examine the seismic shaking from an earlier event in the region of a later event to see if small earthquakes were triggered as the seismic waves went by which could have led to a cascade of failures culminating in a larger event.
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