A violent magnitude earthquake 5.8 (source CSN) hit the Northern Chile Yesterday at 11:50 pm (local time, in Italy 5:50 today), at approximately 32 km from the city of Camiña, in the Tarapacà region. The shock recorded a hypocenter a 104 km deep (source CSN) and, fortunately, it did not cause serious damage or victims in the area. At the moment There are no tsunami alerts.
As often happens in these cases, the exact magnitude of the earthquake is not yet known with certainty. The Nacional sismológia center Chilean reports a value of 5.8 while theIngv el ‘USGS argue that this is of 5.7. It is a minimum difference and in all probability further analyzes will allow data to converge towards a single value. The same goes for the depth: the CSN reports a value of 104 km while the USGS of 105 km and the INGV of 87 km.
But what are the geological causes of this seismic event? To have a clearer picture of the situation we can analyze the following image.
The area is full of rim of different colors and measures. The circles bigger represent shocks with high magnitude values, while the more looking for more dark they indicate earthquakes with more epicenter deep. The so high presence of circles indicates that the area has been the target of numerous earthquakes in recent decades. The causes to the macroscala are to be found in the subduction of the peaceful plaque below that South American: This gives life to a long sequence of earthquakes and volcanoes throughout the Andeina Cordigliera. This area, in turn, is part of the so -called Pacific fire belta huge area around the ocean famous for the high presence of volcanoes.
