Big Earthquake in the Caribbean

Hey, that was some serious stuff man! I was up doing some painting around 3pm LT when the whole house began to shake violently! I was nearly thrown off the stool I was standing on. Then I ran out of the house in case it decided to drop down on me. The cars in the road were all shaking violently to and fro, I have never seen anything like it other than on TV.

But what has me, is that I am in Barbados...and if we felt that they way it was... I can't imagine how it was for places like Antigua, Dominica, Montserrat and so on that are much closer to the epicenter. I just have to tell you, that we are lucky because the source of the quake was about 90 miles deep into the crust. If it was significantly closer, probably more damage would have been done and the idea of Tsunamis could be conjured up.

LOL

That is funny Sea Eric! Seriously though, there was no major damage here in Barbados, none at all really, just cosmetic damage to buildings such as tiles dropping off, veneer dropping off, cracks in buildings. The most significant damage was to a house in St. George (the parish in the center of the island) where the entire back piece of it dropped into a ravine! That was a wall house.

Other damages was just to the general public's emotions and psyche. Barbados has never felt a major tremmor in its recent history. Certainly it was new to me, it was a nice practical lesson to put with the inclass geography courses!

Yes it was scary Francois but I do not think it had anything to do with the weather. The earthquake and the resulting tremmor that we felt (as we (Barbados) are about 280 miles from where the epicenter occured) occured as a result of plate tectionic processes. We humans are habitating upon land, but it is not stationary. The land is moving upon semi fluous materials. The land just happens to be broken up into alot of pieces called tectonic plates- hence tectonic processes- These plates move generally in three distinct directions, Divergent (Away from each other), Convergent (Towards each other), and Transform (parallel to each other).

The Divergent does not cause any real earthquakes because those plates pull away from each other avoiding conflict if you will. Magma usually comes up between the space and as a result, cools and forms new land.
Convergent plates come together and collide with each other resulting in serious earthquakes sometimes. Also, the heavier plate is usually subducted -pulled under the other and consumed and at this collision boundary, you can get fold mountains occuring. The Andes, Himilayas, the Northern Range in Trinidad, are all examples of mountainous formations as a result of convergent plates.

Transform plate boundaries are the serious type of plate movement that causes violent earthquakes. The plates tend to pass parallel to each other but some how ends up grating and scraping against each other. A characteristic of this kind of movement is a fault line. The San Andreas fault in California is a great example of this. This is the reason why they feel numerous tremmors on a given day.

Plates move slowly though, don't let my write up make you think that it is a speedy process. Some plates may move mm's a year, some inches, or in violent quakes mabe even feet at a time.
As I said before, this particular quake occured a couple miles off Martinique and about 90 miles below the earth's crust, so that was a plus for us.