Chile Earthquake

Intro:

The largest earthquake of the 20th century, occurred on May 22 1960 off the coast of South Central Chile. The epicenter of the earthquake was about 60 meters down below the ocean floor, which is about 100 miles off the coast of Chile out in the Pacific. The nearby towns of Valdivia and Puerto Montt suffered ironic damage because of their closeness to the center of such a massive quake. Fortunately, the large foreshocks served as a warning and some lives were saved as many people had evacuated buildings and had taken to the safety of open space.

Possibly 30 minutes or so after the foreshocks when the main jolt came, many people were trying to calm down from the first shock. Near the city of Valdivia, the earthquake and subsequent aftershocks generated landslides which killed 18 people. At the port city of Valparaiso, a city of 200,000, numerous buildings collapsed. A total of 130,000 houses were destroyed - one in every three in the earthquake zone and approximately 2,000,000 people were left homeless. Because of the damages from the buildings and homes, the total cost was probably about over half a billion dollars. Not only was there damage to man-made structures during the quake, but the earth itself was forever changed by the enormous amount of energy released, and huge landslides and such were sent tumbling down mountain slopes.


What Caused The Earthquake?

Faults are cracks in the earth caused by buckling and stress from the movement of the tectonic plates. Movement along faultlines tends to happen along plate boundaries - where the edges of the tectonic plates meet.

Pompeii's Tragedy

It was a terrible and unforgettable memory for Pompeii, Italy which lay in ruins and was buried after the eruption of volcano Mount Vesuvius. This situation happened in AD 79, and as it was buried by the ashes and the bits of remains from Mount Vesuvius, it took quite a long time to be found as it was possibly forgotten. After more than about 1500 years later, Pompeii was finally rediscovered! Today Pompeii is now a popular tourist attraction which many people visit.

Mount Vesuvius is a really active volcano, and is considered as one of the most dangerous and horrendous volcano in the world. Because of this volcano, plenty of people in Pompeii were buried alive and suffocated from the dusty air. At the start of the volcano eruption, there was only a cloud of dusty grayish smoke coming out of the mountain. The people of Pompeii were slightly dumbfounded and bewildered as they had never seen such a thing before. A big crowd soon gathered to watch what was happening, without noticing that the volcano was getting more and more warmed up, getting more dangerous. Quite a few servants of the rich families noticed that something was wrong, and began to reminding their masters that something bad might happen, and that they should go and escape to the other side. They didn’t listen, but instead just waited outside to see what would happen next.

In the next twenty minutes or so, Mount Vesuvius started erupting. At first the people of Pompeii were very amused as they probably thought it was flying rocks coming from the sky. But soon dusty ashes and magma pebbles of all sizes: small and huge started dropping from the sky. People frantically tried to escape, but a few were hit by the rocks and had gotten killed. Some tried to hide from the volcano, and hid in their own houses, but were buried alive inside, with the roof tumbling on top of them. The servants soon knew they had to escape, so they left their masters and rush out to the beach. After a few hours, everyone were waiting at the beach for help from other countries, but unfortunately a rush of volcanic gas (they are few times hotter than boiled water) went right ahead to the beach, so everyone who were there were immediately killed, and their remaining became charcoal, then dust. The people who didn’t try to escape, but instead locked themselves in their houses: they were also killed as a second volcanic gas shot straight to the houses of Pompeii, leaving absolutely no one left.

This situation was a really enormous tragedy, and now if you visit Pompeii you will only see ruins that the archeologists dug out.