7.1 Earthquake off Honduras
Thursday May 28, 2009
At 3:24 a.m. local time, Honduras, eastern Guatemala and Belize felt a large earthquake centered in the Gulf of Honduras near the Islas de Bahia. It was a strike-slip event on the border of the Caribbean and North American plates in an area not known for large quakes. Seismologists should have interesting things to say about it. Find scientific details on the USGS special page for this event. UPDATE: Download a fine poster with maps and details of this quake from the USGS.
Being a transform-related event rather than subduction-related, there was little possibility of a tsunami, and an alert was quickly canceled by the authorities. However, at least one person has six people have died and damage reports are coming in.
Plate tectonic activity, Americas
Strike-slip faults
Introduction to earthquakes
Comments
Hi and thank you for your post.
I teach Science and Math to 5th through 8th grade students here on Utila, one of the Bay Islands (Islas de Bahia) off the coast of Honduras.
I just finished the topic of tectonic plates with my 7th and 8th grade students on Monday and here we are on Thursday with a major earthquake centered about 60 miles from us. School was canceled today, although our area fared pretty well - lots of shaking, a few broken glassware and pictures, but very little structural damage and no deaths nor injuries that I have heard of.
Even so, we are such a small island, that I saw many of my students in town and a few asked about the earthquake and tectonic plates.
Yours was the first site where I found my answer as to which plate “slid past” the Caribbean plate to cause our earthquake.
In addition, we had a substantial aftershock (magnitude 4.8) about 40 minutes after the 7.1 earthquake. This one was even closer to us, but to our northwest instead of our northeast. The second one appears to lie along the same plate boundary as the first one.
This was the first time any of my students had heard of plate tectonics, so I kept it very introductory. (Many of my students have commented in general that their parents, friends and relatives sometimes look at their notebooks/classwork, etc. and say that my students are learning things that they never learned in school.)
I suspect that my lovely, brilliant students will have lots of questions tomorrow and that they will be able to pass some interesting facts on to their families about tectonic plates.
One clarification in your article, the 7.1 mag quake happened at 2:24am local time (we are Zulu -6 year round).
Thanks again for your post.