Yesterday marked a year since the devastating earthquake in Haiti, which killed at least 200,000 people and ruined much of Port-au-Prince. And while the human inhabitants of Haiti are still struggling back, there’s been a bit of good news from the wildlife sector. Biologists have rediscovered six frog species in the Haitian forest that haven’t been seen in two decades and were feared lost.
“I am very wary of highlighting frogs at this time in Haiti. Obviously the country has very pressing needs, but I think ultimately they are a symbol of something more hopeful,” said Robin Moore, an amphibian expert with Conservation International who helped lead the expedition that found the frogs. [MSNBC]
Moore’s expedition set out in search of the La Selle Grass frog (E. glanduliferoides), which hasn’t been seen since 1985 and is feared extinct; the mission was part of Conservation International’s “Search for Lost Frogs” campaign. The researchers didn’t find the La Selle Grass frog, but they found plenty of other frogs that they hadn’t expected to catch sight of.
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The planet’s tumult never ceases. Hurricane Tomas is bearing down on Haiti right now, and an erupting volcano continues to wreak destruction on Indonesia.
At 8 a.m. EDT on Nov. 5, Tomas’ center was about 80 miles south-southeast of Guantanamo, Cuba and 160 miles west of Port Au Prince Haiti…. Tomas is moving to the northeast near 10 mph, and is expected to speed up over the next couple of days. [NASA Press release]
The hurricane is currently a category one, with sustained winds of 85 miles per hour, and is expected to continue strengthen throughout Friday before weakening on Saturday. The hurricane’s strong winds and flooding may hit the country hard: Haiti’s earthquake in January left the country particularly susceptible to land slides.
“Haiti has a really serious history of big landslides, almost all of them caused by tropical storm or hurricane rainfall,” said geologist David Petley, the Wilson Professor of Hazard and Risk at Durham University in England. [LiveScience]
If the hurricane stays on its current course it will pass just to the west of the small island nation, but there may still be plenty of damage and human misery. Many Haitians whose homes were destroyed in the earthquake are still living in temporary homes that won’t be able to stand up to the winds.
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As doctors try to contain the lethal outbreak of cholera in Haiti, geologists have more bad news for the island nation. The disastrous earthquake that struck in January did not release the stress on the main east-west fault that underlies Haiti, but in fact probably originated from a separate fault line, according to separate studies out in Nature Geoscience. That means Haiti is in danger of more major earthquakes.
Directly after the earthquake, some geologists said the most likely cause was Haiti’s Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault, which has been building up pressure since the mid-1700′s. But not so, according to Eric Calais of the U.S. Geological Survey, who now says that an unmapped fault now named Léogâne was probably the source of the January disaster.
At first, scientists focused on the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault on Haiti’s southern peninsula — one of two main faults in the region. But the team said measurements of ground motion suggest the movement caused the surface to bulge, but not to rupture. Calais’ measurements led them to conclude a previously unknown fault must have caused the January quake. [ABC News]
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NASA is sending a radar-equipped jet to conduct flights over Haiti and the Dominican Republic to capture 3-D images that could help predict future earthquakes. An estimated 170,000 people were killed in the 7.0 earthquake that battered Haiti on January 12. Unfortunately, experts predict more quakes as the country is situated in a seismically volatile zone.
A Gulfstream III jet is now on its way to map Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the two nations that share the island of Hispaniola. The Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar, or UAVSAR, was originally on its way to Central America to study volcanoes, forests, and Mayan ruins, but on its way south it will now also study Hispaniola’s fault lines.
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Satellite photos that have just been released reveal the scope of the physical destruction wrought by the 7.0 earthquake that struck the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince on Tuesday. The human toll of is still unknown–but with much of the city reduced to rubble, experts say tens of thousands of people may be dead.
This image shows roads covered with debris from collapsed structures, and the white-colored National Palace with damage visible along the roof line. The image was taken by the GeoEye-1 satellite from 423 miles up in space on Wednesday morning.
Image: GeoEye
As Haiti reels from yesterday’s massive earthquake and its continued aftershocks, and nations rush to put rescue efforts together, scientists analyzing the seismic event say this disaster may have been a long time coming.
The earthquake in Haiti had a preliminary magnitude of 7.0 and it appeared to have occurred along a strike-slip fault, where one side of a vertical fault slips horizontally past the other, scientists say [AP]. This fault, called the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault, may have been slowly building up pressure since the major 1760 earthquake that struck Haiti.
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