{"id":6307,"date":"2017-09-20T11:00:11","date_gmt":"2017-09-20T10:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ounews.co\/?p=6307"},"modified":"2017-09-20T11:00:11","modified_gmt":"2017-09-20T10:00:11","slug":"mexico-earthquake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/science-mct\/science-environment\/mexico-earthquake\/","title":{"rendered":"Mexico Earthquake: Expert reaction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Prof David Rothery, Professor of Planetary Geosciences, The Open University, said:<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_6308\" style=\"width: 210px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-6308\" class=\"wp-image-6308 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/Dave-Rothery.jpg\" alt=\"Dave Rothery\" width=\"200\" height=\"240\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-6308\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Professor David Rothery<\/p><\/div>\n<p>\u201cThe epicentre of yesterday\u2019s magnitude 7.1 earthquake in Mexico was about 500 km from the magnitude 8.1 quake of 8 September.\u00a0 There is no direct connection between the two, although they are both consequences of the convergence of the Pacific floor (here belonging to the Cocos Plate) and the North American Plate on which Mexico sits.\u00a0 The plates don\u2019t slip smoothly past each other.\u00a0 Instead the deformation builds up by flexing and bending until enough stress has been built up to release the blockage allowing many year\u2019s worth of movement to occur in a few seconds.\u00a0 What happened yesterday was most likely a tearing motion in the subducting Cocos Plate.\u00a0 Fortunately this occurred deep down (about 50 km) so the shaking at ground level was not as bad as it might have been.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOn the other hand, parts of Mexico City are built on a former lake bed, where the nature of the soil tends to magnify the shaking, as happened in the 1985 earthquake (also 19 Sept).<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt is all too common for schools to collapse during earthquakes.\u00a0 The Enrique R\u00e9bsamen elementary school where many children died looks like a modern building, and ought to have had in-built earthquake resilience.\u00a0 Had it been properly constructed it should not have collapsed, and I expect questions will be asked about whether the appropriate building codes were adhered to.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Prof David Rothery, Professor of Planetary Geosciences, The Open University, said: \u201cThe epicentre of yesterday\u2019s magnitude 7.1 earthquake in Mexico was about 500 km from the magnitude 8.1 quake of 8 September.\u00a0 There is no direct connection between the two, although they are both consequences of the convergence of the Pacific floor (here belonging to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":6311,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[750,1420,1794],"class_list":["post-6307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science-environment","tag-earthquake","tag-mexico","tag-professor-david-rothery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6307\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}