The Haiti 2010 Earthquake: A 3D deformation analysis

Abstract

On January 12,2010 at 2153 GMT, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the region of Haiti with its hypo center at a distance of25 km from the capital city of Port-au-Prince. This disaster killed about 316,000, injured 300,000 and displaced another 1.3 million people in and around Port-au-Prince. The earthquake is believed to have occurred along the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone, which is one of the two main strike-slip faults inferred to accommodate about 7-10 mm/yr relative motion between the Caribbean and the North American Plates. In order to analyse the deformation caused by the earthquake, TerraSAR-X and ALOS-PALSAR data, was processed using Differential Interferometry and Incoherent cross-correlation methods. 3D inversion was then performed on the incoherent cross-correlation results to get the deformation in three dimensions.