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Chile Quake Damage

WHOI geophysicist Jian Lin points to a 12-story building in Concepcion, Chile, that was upended and toppled by the magnitude 8.8 earthquake on February 27, 2010. Luckily, the building was unoccupied at the time. According to Lin, who has conducted extensive research on how earthquakes interact through the transfer of stress in space and time, the quake occurred on a wide fault plane extending from offshore to beneath Chile where stress had been accumulating since a magnitude 9.5 quake in 1960. (Photo by Dr. HungJui Tsai, Taiwan National Ocean University)