This is a Tsunami warning message taken from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre which cancelled a Caribbean sea watch yesterday:
AN EARTHQUAKE HAS OCCURRED WITH THESE PRELIMINARY PARAMETERS
ORIGIN TIME – 2153Z 12 JAN 2010
COORDINATES – 18.5 NORTH 72.5 WEST
LOCATION – HAITI REGION
MAGNITUDE – 7.1
EVALUATION
A TSUNAMI MEASURING 12 CM CREST-TO-TROUGH WAS RECORDED AT SANTO
DOMINGO IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC AND A TSUNAMI LESS THAN 1 CM
CREST-TO-TROUGH WAS RECORDED ON A DEEP OCEAN GAUGE IN THE
EAST-CENTRAL CARIBBEAN.
Some more technical information was made available by the US Geological survey:
At the longitude of the January 12 earthquake, motion between the Caribbean and North American plates is partitioned between two major east-west trending, strike-slip fault systems — the Septentrional fault system in northern Haiti and the Enriquillo-Plaintain Garden fault system in southern Haiti.
The location and focal mechanism of the earthquake are consistent with the event having occurred as left-lateral strike slip faulting on the Enriquillo-Plaintain Garden fault system.
The Haitian Ambassador to the United States has made a plea for help and President Obama has expressed his sympathies with the people of Port-au-Prince, who were worst affected.
In This Story: Barack Obama
Barack Obama is an American politician and attorney who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the United States. He previously served as a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004.
Obama left office in January 2017 and continues to reside in Washington, D.C.
The Caribbean is a region of the Americas that comprises the Caribbean Sea, its surrounding coasts, and its islands. The region lies southeast of the Gulf of Mexico and of the North American mainland, east of Central America, and north of South America.
The Dominican Republic is a country located on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles archipelago of the Caribbean region. It occupies the eastern five-eighths of the island, which it shares with Haiti, making Hispaniola one of only two Caribbean islands, along with Saint Martin, that are shared by two sovereign states.
The country is the site of the second largest gold mine in the world, the Pueblo Viejo mine.
The Dominican Republic is the most visited destination in the Caribbean. The year-round golf courses are major attractions. A geographically diverse nation, the Dominican Republic is home to both the Caribbean’s tallest mountain peak, Pico Duarte, and the Caribbean’s largest lake and point of lowest elevation, Lake Enriquillo.
Haiti is a Caribbean country that shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic to its east. Though it’s still recovering from a 2010 earthquake, many of Haiti’s landmarks dating to the early 19th century remain intact. These include Citadelle la Ferrière, a mountaintop fortress.
Jean-Jacques Dessalines (later Emperor Jacques I), defeated Napoleon Bonaparte’s forces and declared Haiti’s sovereignty on 1 January 1804.
Haiti became the only state in history established by a successful slave revolt. Apart from Alexandre Pétion, the first President of the Republic, all of Haiti’s first leaders were former slaves.
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth’s oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean in the south and is bounded by the continents of Asia and Australia in the west and the Americas in the east
The United States is a country also known as the United States of America, USA, US or just America. There are fifty states in the union, which is a federal republic ruled by a representative democracy. Nearly ten million square kilometres are inhabited by over 300 million people. The majority of Americans speak English.
