Puerto Rico has been shaking and rumbling, the recent series of earthquakes causing major damage to cities and infrastructure. The strongest earthquake recorded Tuesday, a 6.4 magnitude earthquake.
FOX61’s Rachel Piscitelli spoke with Geology and Geophysics Yale Professor Maureen Long to learn more about why this is happening.
Professor Long explained the earth is made up of plate tectonics and “those plates are moving around in respect to each other so sometimes the two plates may come together sometimes they may pull apart and sometimes plates move past each other and often when we see a boundary between plates that when we see tectonic activity like earthquakes.”
Puerto Rico is on a boundary between the North American Plate and the Caribbean plate which makes the island prone to events like this.
No two events are alike and scientists are still researching why sometimes there is one major earthquake followed by aftershocks and sometimes there is not.
Either way Long says “it is not uncommon to see earthquake events like this, it doesn’t happen that way all the time but in this case we’re seeing a sequence of events”