Quotes of the Day

The image on Falk Amelung's laptop screen looks like 1960s psychedelia. But the interferogram, a composite radar snapshot of Haiti captured by Japanese satellite before and just after the Jan. 12 earthquake, is a trove of geological information. And much of it has surprised the University of Miami professor of geology and geophysics. "In theory this should have been an earthquake of simple left-lateral movement along the fault line," says Amelung. Then he points to the kaleidoscopic color contours rippling from the quake's epicenter, west of the capital, Port-au-Prince, which indicate vertical quake movement as well. "It's more than we would have thought to see in this region," he says. "We're puzzling over this."

As a result of that anomaly and others they've seen so far, Amelung and many of his colleagues are urging the Haitian government and its international donors to consider relocating the capital, which was largely reduced to rubble by the quake. The most important infrastructure should be rebuilt at a site well away from a fault line that they believe will rupture again within the next generation or two, but even closer to Port-au-Prince. "If this were a typical earthquake, the risk of future incidents would decline over the next few months," says Tim Dixon, also a geology and geophysics professor at Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Sciences. "The stress would be relieved and we could all go back to sleep for another 250 years," which is about how long ago Haiti's Enriquillo Fault last convulsed. "But that's not the case here — our findings suggest another shoe has to drop."

That's largely because of the limited length of the fault-line rupture that caused the January earthquake. Amelung and Dixon, working with two other University of Miami geologists, Sang Hoon Hong and Shimon Wdowinski, say the quake exhibited quite a bit of odd behavior. Its rupture, for example, did not reach the earth's surface, unusual for its powerful 7.0-magnitude. But the more important question is why only the western half of the Enriquillo Fault segment that ruptured in 1751 fractured this time. (That half, about 25 miles, in length, lies right under the city of Leogane, the Jan. 12 epicenter, which is about 20 miles west of Port-au-Prince.) The result is that the eastern half of the segment — the one much closer to Port-au-Prince — is subject to that much more stress, which may cause another major quake to come sooner than later. "Even if the next earthquake is the same 7.0 magnitude," says Amelung, "it will still be more damaging to Port-au-Prince" than last month’s quake was."

Amelung wants to explore how, if at all, the quake's unexpected vertical motion may have affected the January rupture's short length and potent magnitude. But whatever the cause, the scientists say Haiti can escape the devastation of a seismic sequel. Says Dixon, "We feel we have enough knowledge gathered now to recommend that [Haiti] should rebuild critical infrastructure farther to the north, out of harm's way," and where the ground often has more stable rock instead of the more alluvial soil around Port-au-Prince.

The earth scientists' case for moving the capital may actually dovetail with the arguments of social scientists. Haiti is the western hemisphere's poorest country, which is a key reason Port-au-Prince, with some 2 million residents, is one of the world's most densely populated cities. This combination of factors also helps explain why as many as 150,000 people were killed in last month's quake. Many development experts believe the city's population needs to be halved, and the rebuilding process may offer an opportunity to resettle some half million people outside the metropolis to new or existing communities that offer jobs and infrastructure.

Moving an entire capital, of course, is another matter, even if the collapse of the National Palace and other key government structures makes it more possible to contemplate. It's hardly unprecedented, and could even serve as a driver of development. The earthquake "creates opportunities for development elsewhere in the country," says Jocelyn McCalla, a development advisor to the Haitian government. "Haiti has to be engaged now in a major decentralizing effort." Brazil did just that in the 1950s when it moved its capital, with all the associated buildings and bureaucracy, from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia, some 600 miles away on the country's relatively unpopulated central plateau. Most Brazilians today agree that the move helped spread political and economic power.

Amelung and Dixon say it behooves Haiti to at least consider relocation scenarios, perhaps moving government, medical and education infrastructure as far north as the port city of St. Marc. Although scientists may traditionally take several months to publish such findings in a peer-reviewed journal, the geologists say the urgency of the policy choices facing Haiti right now demanded they get the word out quickly. Data from the Japanese satellite's synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging is reaching the broader scientific community in a timelier manner, thanks to new digital supersites developed last year by Amelung and other members of the international Group of Earth Observations (GEO), including JAXA, the Japanese space agency. GEO is working to break through the bureaucratic logjams in which such data often become mired.

The Haiti information, which is also being studied by NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) as well as the U.S. Geological Survey, indicates that "this [tectonic] plate boundary is way more complicated than we previously thought," says Amelung. The Caribbean isn't generally known for seismic catastrophe. But scientists, including Dixon, began seriously scrutinizing the Enriquillo Fault in the 1980s, eventually determining that it was a major quake hazard. Known formally as the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault, it forms a boundary between the North American and Caribbean plates — and a sort of volatile spine running along the southwest peninsula of Hispaniola, the island Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic.

Port-au-Prince has experienced at least two large aftershocks since Jan. 12. Geologists such as Eric Calais of Purdue University are trying to ascertain whether those are a sign of the fault settling, or setting up for a bigger earthquake in the near future. Calais told the National Science Foundation last week that he and his team are also "concerned for the Dominican Republic, as our preliminary models show that the continuation of the fault in this area is loaded."

Whether or not Haiti and its international donors agree to move the capital, the geological findings mean they'll have to give serious attention to proposals on population relocation, and to tightening Haiti's abysmally shoddy construction codes, which allowed the quake to wreak greater havoc than it should have. That disaster may have caught authorities unprepared, but they no longer have that excuse.

• TIM PADGETT