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The magnitude 7 earthquake that leveled much of Haiti's capital Tuesday – the strongest temblor
to hit the country in some 200 years -- may have increased strain on a segment of the same fault
that lies across the border in the Dominican Republic.
Haiti's vulnerability on the Caribbean tectonic plate
Haiti's vulnerability on the Caribbean tectonic plate

That concern, based on calculations made during the first 24 hours after the quake hit, may ease
with additional on-the-ground data, cautions Purdue University geophysicist Eric Calais, who has
spent years studying faults on Hispaniola, the island both countries share.

But since the mid-1980s and the advent of precision satellite measurements of ground
movement, plus other high-tech advances, earth scientists have developed an increasing respect
for the ability of the slip of one fault to increase the strain on other, nearby faults, or on a different
segment of the original fault.

In any effort to track changes in strain, "I would focus on the eastern termination of the fault
towards the Dominican Republic, pending more information," he says. The reason: The rupture
slid to the east. While strain would build at both ends of the ruptured segment, another rupture
farther to the west would occur in a sparsely populated, hard to reach portion of Haiti. To the east,
however, the fault traces a path through the mountains separating Haiti from the Dominican
Republic and into the more-heavily populated southwestern portion of Haiti's neighbor.

Already, teams of researchers are planning to visit the stricken area to take the full measure of
the quake before erosion or rebuilding efforts erase key pieces of evidence.

"A lot of the data we need to collect are pretty ephemeral," says Carol Prentice, a US Geological
Survey researcher who is part of a relatively small group of scientists who have studied the area.

Accurate measurements of ground movement -- seen in offset stream beds or displaced roads,
for instance -- help establish the amount of strain released. Careful monitoring of the strongest
aftershocks, which can die off fairly quickly after a quake, help establish how deep in the crust the
quake's break-point was. Tracking the quake's aftermath over the long term will help researchers
better understand the slow rebound that occurs along the fault after the initial snap.

Why Haiti's fault got less attention

The tragic event has struck a broad patch of the globe -- the Caribbean -- well known for
earthquakes and volcanic activity. But while islands such as Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and the
Antilles chains are fairly well studied, Haiti hasn't received the same attention, since working in a
country that is no stranger to poverty and hardship can be downright unsafe.

Still, scientists have pulled together an increasingly clear picture of the broad geophysical context
in which Monday's event took place. Hispaniola sits squarely atop a boundary between two plates
in Earth's crust: the North American Plate and the Caribbean Plate. The Caribbean Plate is trying
to slide past a particularly tough block of crust underlying the Bahamas. The two are grinding past
each other, much like the motion along another plate boundary -- California's San Andreas Fault.

Tuesday's quake occurred along the Enriquilla-Plantain Garden Fault, an east-west crack in the
Earth that also runs west through Jamaica and out to the Cayman Islands. But Hispaniola also is
home to another major fault, which cuts across its northern interior and heads toward Cuba.

These two fault systems trace their origins to a broader interaction between the North American
plate and the Caribbean Plate. The North American plate is plunging under the Caribbean plate
north of Hispanola and Puerto Rico. But one portion of the North America plate dubbed the
Bahamas Platform is too bouyant to make the plunge easily, reseachers say. The result: The
giant collision is deforming Hispanola.

Over millions of years, Hispaniola's northern fault, the Septentrional, has been the major pathway
for building and releasing strain from the sideways motion of the two plates. But some
researchers now argue that activity may be shifting; the Enriquilla-Plantain Garden Fault may
slowly be taking over as the main strain-relief valve for the plate boundary, explains Uri ten Brink,
a geophysicist with the US Geological Survey's office in Woods Hole, Mass.

In effect, the region has two parallel plate boundaries. "That's quite unusual," he says. Indeed,
given the number of people who live on the island, as well as the number who visit, "this was
really a wake-up call to me to try and understand this system."