First came the 8.1-magnitude earthquake that struck offshore of Chiapas, Mexico, killing dozens and turning many buildings in the nearby region into rubble. Get the best of Smithsonian magazine by email. The cure for earthquake devastation is well known -- fix the old buildings and improve construction methods -- and too complex and expensive to accomplish in less than decades. The sudden release of energy causes seismic waves to radiate out from the epicenter. The earthquake happened on the anniversary of a 1985 quake that killed an estimated 9,500 people in and around Mexico City. The US Geological Survey predicts up to … Recovery efforts take place at the collapse of a residential building in Mexico City on September 19. Along the coast of Mexico, the Cocos Plate slides underneath the North American Plate, moving about three inches per year. “Unfortunately many people have lost their lives, including girls and boys in schools, buildings and houses. A magnitude 7.1 quake. Volunteers arrange food and other donated supplies at a distribution point in Mexico City on September 20. Depending on the frequency of the seismic waves, the movement of the ground can feed energy into buildings of a certain height. "This [earthquake] taught us that soft soils can magnify motion to a degree never thought possible," University of California at Berkeley engineer Vitelmo Berto told the LA Times in 1986, a year after the disaster. A deadly M 7.1 earthquake struck nearby Mexico City yesterday, leaving over 200 dead and countless missing. This was also the cause of the 8.1-earthquake that hit Mexico two weeks ago. The reason: Ancient sediments that underlie the city trap and magnify the vibrations that ripple through the region. Further, the tremors caused gas mains to break, causing fires and explosions throughout the city. JUDY WOODRUFF: Yesterday's earthquake in Mexico was the second in less than two weeks and brought back memories of the terrible tremor that hit 30 years to the day yesterday. Men carry beams of wood to offer help in Mexico City's Roma neighborhood on September 20. “A basin will have natural frequencies, which depend on its shape and size, as well as the material properties of the sediments inside,” explains Jascha Polet, a geophysicist at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, via e-mail. Her work has appeared on National Geographic and AGU's Eos and Plainspoken Scientist. (CNN)Another deadly earthquake struck deep under Mexico. Coming off the heels of Mexico City's latest tragedy, however, the focus must be on the people of central Mexico. This movement is causing extreme tensions as the slab is rammed into the Earth. When earthquake tremors hit solid rock, the rock simply shakes. Mexican government officials are still tallying up the economic losses of the magnitude 7.1 earthquake that caused widespread damage in the capital, … Follow him on Twitter at @seismoguy. A search goes on at the scene of a collapsed building in Mexico City's Del Valle neighborhood on September 19. However, this was not the cause of the most severe structural damage. 17th Annual Photo Contest Finalists Announced. One might assume that the Sept. 8 … While it’s long been known that sediments can magnify tremors, researchers didn’t learn exactly how dramatic the effects could be until 1985. People remove debris off a building that collapsed in Mexico City. Some of additional damages were indirectly caused by the earthquake. In the aftermath of the earthquake, about 3,500 buildings had collapsed or were seriously damaged. This, as yesterday’s quake shows, causes them to sway—and eventually topple. Meantime Mexico's. If the government continues to deem it worthwhile, the United States will also have an early warning system in a few years. The earthquake resulted in around $3 billion to $4 billion in damage. Further, the tremors caused gas mains to break, causing fires and explosions throughout the city. The September 19, 1985 earthquake caused con- siderable damage to modern construction in Mexico City, but only in those areas on the bed of an old lake because there the ground motion was considerably amplified (Beck and Hall, 1986). A man is rescued under rubble in Mexico City's Condesa area on September 19. There have been 34 earthquakes bigger than magnitude-7 within 300 miles of Tuesday's quake since 1900. Children's toys are seen in a damaged building in Mexico City on September 20. The earthquake caused landslides, rockslides, and sandblows, opened cracks in the ground and damaged or destroyed buildings. Though the fact that these quakes occurred on the same day 32 years apart is purely coincidence, their dramatic impact on the capital is not. A car is crushed by debris in Mexico City on September 19. A religious statue is salvaged from a former convent that was heavily damaged in Tlayacapan, Mexico. Its entire Pacific coast is a large and fast moving (that is, moving as fast as fingernails grow-- speedy in plate tectonics terms) plate boundary, often suffering large and great earthquakes. Vote Now! Sides of building crumble after Mexican quake, trapped inside the Enrique Rebsamen elementary school, John Vidale: Mexico's earthquake caused by crumpling from the downward bending of the sinking Cocos Plate deep within earth, He says cure for devastation: make buildings earthquake proof. At least 149 people have been reported dead after a devastating earthquake shook Mexico City and the surrounding areas, destroying buildings and sending residents scrambling to … Its soil amplifies shaking like Jell-O on a plate, and is prone to liquefaction, which is the ability to transform dirt into a dense liquid when sufficiently churned. Volunteers and rescue workers search for people trapped inside the Enrique Rebsamen school on September 20. In Mexico … Flash Report on Damage Caused in Mexico City, Mexico, by the 2017 Puebla-Morelos Earthquake Tsuneo OHSUMI Dr., Research Center for Reinforcement of Resilient Function, National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience (NIED), Tsukuba, … Plate tectonics was the engine behind the shaking, as is true for all major earthquakes. The first of these occurred on 20 September with a magnitude of 7.5 and the sec… I want to express my condolences to those who lost a family member or a loved one. Advertising Notice A woman in Mexico City reacts after the quake. This annual rite both honors the 10,000 people who lost their lives in that disaster and prepares the city’s current residents for the next natural disaster. Mexico City, the country’s densely-populated capital, is even more susceptible to earthquakes than the rest of the country. People stand inside a Mexico City building that collapsed in the quake. When the damage was finally assessed, 3,000 buildings in Mexico City … Maya Wei-Haas is the assistant editor for science and innovation at Smithsonian.com. The sequence of events included a foreshock of magnitude 5.2 that occurred the prior May, the main shock on 19 September, and two large aftershocks. Continue A man comforts a student outside a school in Mexico City on September 19. Mexico City in chaos is what we saw when these first … Other seismologists have likened these lakebed dynamics to a bowl of Jello. California Do Not Sell My Info Hundreds more have shaken the thousands of miles that make up the country's coastline, many topping eight on the equivalent Richter scale. REBECCA LAI SEPT. 23, 2017 A 7.1 magnitude earthquake on Tuesday killed more than … But yesterday, soon after business had resumed, central Mexico was rocked by a real—and deadly—7.1-magnitude earthquake. A woman in Mexico City cries as she tries to reach people on her cell phone after the quake. President Enrique Pena Nieto said Wednesday [Sept. 27] that preliminary accounting of the damage caused by the two big earthquakes that hit Mexico this … This holds true even if the epicenter of the quake is positioned far from the city’s boundaries, which was the case for both this latest earthquake (which originated nearly 100 miles southeast of Mexico City in the state of Puebla), and the 1985 earthquake (whose epicenter was some 200 miles from the capital). Mexico shares your grief.”. Rescue workers in Mexico City search for people trapped inside the collapsed Enrique Rebsamen school on September 19. By LARRY BUCHANAN, JASMINE C. LEE, SERGIO PEÇANHA and K.K. People react in Mexico City just after the quake hit. Mexico City sits atop an ancient shallow lake, with soils made of sediments that washed in from the surrounding mountains thousands of years ago. It produced strong motions felt by more than 12 million people, and noticeably swayed buildings in Mexico’s capital city, some of which collapsed. The event caused serious damage to the Greater Mexico Cityarea and the deaths of at least 5,000 people. In videos posted to Youtube and Twitter, many structures seemed to disintegrate under the vibrations. Rescue workers and volunteers search a collapsed building in Mexico City on September 19. "It's almost like a bathtub, the [seismic] waves will slosh back and forth," she says. The quake damaged the Jojutla Municipal Palace. 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It gets worse. The temblor nearly flattened the distant Mexico City, yet left many cities close to the epicenter nearly unscathed. A wall is damaged at a home in Tlayacapan on Wednesday, September 20. John Vidale, a seismologist, is a professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California and director of the Southern California Earthquake Center. Rescuers and firefighters lower a corpse from a house in Mexico City on September 20. “No one had designed for it, and that is why so many buildings failed.”. Mexico has been learning how to deal with this problem the hard way. Liquefaction worsened the impacts of the 1985 earthquake, undermining the foundation of many buildings. When the damage was finally assessed, 3,000 buildings in Mexico City were demolished and another 100,000 suffered serious damage. Almost nine million people live in Mexico City. In the early 1300s, attracted by those fertile soils, the Aztecs selected an island in the lake on which to build their capital city, Tenochtitlan, which eventually became Mexico City. Earthquake kills dozens in central Mexico, 5 things you should know about earthquakes, See 15 years of earthquakes in 45 seconds, Search for survivors after tsunami continues, Deadly tsunami hits Indonesian island of Sulawesi, Hundreds of hikers rescued after earthquake, Relatives of missing people wait for news in front of a collapsed building in Mexico City on Friday, September 22. Smithsonian Institution, (U.S. Geological Survey Department of the Interior/USGS/I.D. Additional damage occurred in Mexico City when adjacent 20 story buildings swayed enough to bump into one another. A magnitude 8.1 quake. It is not immediately clear whether Tuesday's earthquake was triggered by the earlier one or if it is unrelated -- usually aftershocks are not so distant in time. Tuesday’s magnitude 7.1 quake struck about 76 miles southeast of Mexico City, according to the US Geological Survey. The earthquake caused damage in the Mexican states of Puebla and Morelos and in the Greater Mexico City area, including the collapse of more than 40 buildings. This was the second earthquake to hit Mexico in two weeks. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. Updated 1429 GMT (2229 HKT) September 20, 2017. Though the Spanish later drained the surrounding waters to prevent frequent flooding, the effects of that decision can still be felt today. Two weeks ago, an 8.1 magnitude earthquake—the strongest in a century—jolted southern Mexico, killing nearly 100 people. This latest quake was centered on a region where the Cocos tectonic plate, which sits beneath the Pacific Ocean, is slowly being shoved beneath the continental North American plate. These latest quakes were caused by the movement of tectonic plates, the pieces of Earth’s crust that move and jostle against each other. When soils are saturated with water, intense shaking can cause them to lose their solid structures and begin acting like a liquid—to the point that the ground can swallow up cars like quick sand. It struck Mexico 400 miles to the southeast and offshore, not far from Guatemala, and killed dozens of people. Emergency workers remove debris as they search for survivors in Mexico City on September 19. Tuesday's toll indicates there is yet more work to do. 370 people were killed by the earthquake and related building collapses, including 228 in Mexico City, and more than 6,000 were injured. Mexico City earthquake of 1985, also called Michoacán earthquake of 1985, severe earthquake that occurred on September 19, 1985, off the coast of the Mexican state of Michoacán, causing widespread death and injuries and catastrophic damage in Mexico’s … That earthquake was an 8.0 magnitude and it caused extreme damage to Mexico City. Tuesday’s earthquake, however, was caused by … KTLA- Damage Caused by 7.1 Earthquake in Mexico City. Initial reports are that the system worked Tuesday. A magnitude 8.0 earthquake killed more than 9,500 people 32 years ago. Keep up-to-date on: © 2021 Smithsonian Magazine. Until today, nobody really knows how many people perished as a result of the earthquake. “Think of pushing a kid on a swing,” Hough adds. The 1985 Mexico City earthquake struck in the early morning of 19 September at 07:17:50 (CST) with a moment magnitude of 8.0 and a maximal Mercalli intensity of IX (Violent). Overall, the slope stability issues caused by the 2017 Puebla-Mexico City earthquake were relatively minor compared with the reported structural damage . The latest earthquake caused more damage because it … A survivor is pulled out of rubble in Mexico City on September 20. Engineers who surveyed Mexico City reported little significant structural damage. Tuesday's earthquake took place on the anniversary of a devastating earthquake that killed thousands in Mexico City in 1985. Patients from a Mexico City hospital receive treatment outside after the hospital was evacuated on September 19. The seismic waves that were taking down buildings were five times greater than waves outside the city, according to measurements taken during that event, reported the LA Times. Tuesday's earthquake, however, was caused by crumpling arising from the downward bending of the sinking Cocos Plate, rather than directly by slippage between plates. A similarly deep but much larger magnitude 8.1-earthquake struck two weeks ago, also from the crumpling of the Cocos Plate. Privacy Statement At least 200 people died, according to the Associated Press and other news outlets. Powerful Earthquake Jolts Southern Mexico and Kills at Least 6 The 7.5-magnitude quake, centered on the Pacific Coast in the state of Oaxaca, damaged some structures and caused buildings to … It was 30 years ago today that at least 5,000 people — some estimates put the number at closer to 10,000, others at four times that — died in the powerful Mexico City earthquake of 1985. The greatest impact was in densely populated Mexico City, but the shaking was even more intense in Puebla, closer to the epicenter. Mexico sits atop a complicated juncture of tectonic plates, which have been engaged in a slow-motion collision for over a million years. Cookie Policy As these plates scrape against one another, tension builds until they reach a breaking point—which is when an earthquake strikes. In the history of Mexican earthquakes, Tuesday's was coincidentally the 32nd anniversary of the 1985 Michoacan earthquake, which resulted in thousands of deaths. Mexico City's downtown area is notoriously vulnerable to earthquakes because of the very soft and wet ground underneath. People look for survivors in Mexico City on September 20. Ironically, the US does not yet have such a system, but is trying to build one. Rescuers in Mexico City work to save a child. Photos show the devastating impact of the deadly 7.1 magnitude earthquake that rattled Mexico City, killing more than 220 people The quake killed at least 220 people Time.com Shortly after noon on Tuesday, an earthquake violently shook the area around Mexico City, collapsing numerous buildings into dust, killing more than 100. Less than 15 minutes after the quake, thousands of people in the capital lay dead and the Mexican economy was shattered for years to come. A building is damaged in Mexico City on September 19. While it is not yet known if this is a factor for the latest quake, “it would not be surprising,” says Polet. Celebi). Terms of Use About 1000 buildings, mostly of masonry and rein- This reverberation doesn’t just carry these waves further—it can actually amplify them. The death toll has been disputed, but about 5,000 bodies were … The U.S. Geological Survey Mexico reported that Mexico held a long history of destructive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. “This disaster presents us with a major opportunity to learn and prevent a similar disaster from happening in the United States,” said the National Science Foundation's then-assistant director for engineering during a U.S. congressional briefing in the wake of the 1985 disaster. 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