Why didn the earthquake extend to the Dominican Republic?
The slip and release of tension occurred near Port-au-Prince, but the Enriquillo fault line extends straight through the southern end of the island of Hispaniola, and Haiti’s neighbor may very well experience its own quake in the coming days. When tension is released in one segment of a fault line, it is often displaced down the line to another segment. That tension can then be released as an earthquake. If enough tension was displaced in this way during last night’s quake, the Dominican Republic could be in some serious trouble. Scientists are assess-ing the situation this very moment. What’s the Richter scale and how high is a 7 ? The Richter scale is not a machine (as many people assume) but a mathematical formula used to quantify the amount of energy released by an earthquake. The scale is logarithmic, meaning that each number represents an order of magnitude jump in the amount of energy re-leased. So an earthquake of magnitude 7 is 10 times stronger than an earthquake of 6, and 10
