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Threat of Damaging Earthquake in Central America

The signs of strong earthquake in Central America have been revealed by the NTs OMZ’s specialists when analyzing space geophysical data in June 2009. More recently on 28 May the Ì7.3 EQ occurred in Honduras. The previous catastrophic EQ of M7.7 in magnitude took place on 13 January 2001 in the region.

Here is again a vast territory covering Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, and Costa Rica is exposed to danger of strong earthquake. The parameters of the predicted event are given in space map of geophysical conditions in Annex 1. Probable areas of seismic hazard are marked as Ð1, 2. Area P2 – Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica – are estimated with a probability of 0.7. The predicted date is till 7 July 2009, magnitude is 7.4+ (Annex 3). A strong square cloud structure (B) tracing the Cocos Plate indicates the power of potential EQ. The side of „Thermal crystal“ base of 1640km in length gives a potential magnitude Ì=ln1640~7.4. The lifetime of this cloud structure is more than 10 hours. The structure appeared once again on 23 June 2009 and existed for more than 12 hours. The cloud and electrotelluric signs of strong EQ pending are given in Blocks 1.1-3.2 of Annex 2. A drastic increase of 100-150mV in telluric currents on 17-18 June 2009 (see Blocks 2.2-3.2) registered at widely spaced stations in Greece and Japan, may indicate a global reason. A telluric anomaly coincided with the disturbance of the Chandler wobble. The globality of the reason is also confirmed by an abnormal behavior of LINFA (Block 1.4), ONE, and ANDRES (2 last years in a pending area of probable EQ) typhoons on 17-18 June.

A previous noticeable anomaly in ellectrotellurics was registered at the end of December 2008 (Block 2.1). A jump took place on 25-28 December 2008 and then in 5 days on 3 January two strong Ì7.4 and 7.6 earthquakes occurred in Papua New Guinea and on 15 January 2009 theM7.4 EQ – in Central Kuril Islands.

What will be this time?


Annex 1 (pdf, 643,5 kb)

Annex 2 (pdf, 584,6 kb)

Annex 3 (pdf, 957,9 kb)


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