Chile Quake Shifted City 10 Feet

It may not be enough to send cartographers scrambling, but in geological terms, the city of Concepcion, Chile, took a gigantic slip west during last month’s 8.8-magnitude earthquake: It shifted by a full 10 feet. The fifth-largest earthquake ever recorded also moved the capital city of Santiago 11 inches west. Even Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina nearly 800 miles away from the epicenter, is said to have shifted by an inch. These figures were published by Ohio State earth scientist Mike Bevis, who has been using global positioning systems to track movements on the particularly active section of the Earth’s crust under Chile since 1993.