According to historical records, the rumbling started on the afternoon of May 22, 1960. The ground started to shake. An eye witness, Sergio Barrientos said the shaking was so violent that electrical wires were swinging from the telephone poles so much that they slapped each other from opposite sides of the street.
“At the same time, I saw some of the chimneys falling down through the roofs of the houses,” says Barrientos.
The ground shook so hard that he was knocked off his feet, unable to stand for about 10 minutes as the earth heaved.
Barrientos has since spent years studying earthquakes. He directs the National Seismological Center at the University of Chile in Santiago. The temblor he experienced in 1960 was the most powerful one ever recorded, with a magnitude of at least 9.5.
“It was a huge, huge earthquake,” he said.
He now knows that during that quake, while he was stuck on the road, his hometown lurched about 30 feet west in a fraction of a minute.
“The whole country stretched during this earthquake,” explained Barrientos. “The coast moved toward the west. That increased the area of the country itself.” The quake expanded the country of Chile by an area equal to about 1,500 football fields. It also caused a lot of destruction. Twelve hours after the shaking stopped, a tsunami smashed into Hawaii. Twelve hours later, another tsunami smashed into Japan.
As reported by a 1960 newsreel; “Nations reckon up the grim toll of the seismic shocks that triggered a week of devastating earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in Chile, and tidal waves and tropical storms that battered every shore from the Philippines and Japan to Alaska.”
What became known as the Great Chilean Earthquake revealed something new about the planet that the world itself can vibrate like a guitar string.
The seismic waves went through every part of the globe, even its core. And because they were so strong, scientific instruments from around the world picked up the signal. When it was over, seismologists realized the earthquake had given them a window into Earth’s structure. Nature had given the planet something like an ultrasound scan.
At the time, researchers were just starting to come to an agreement that the continents sat on top of giant plates and that earthquakes were caused as those plates collided and folded into each other.
They also were just realizing that big seismic waves, like the ones that Chile experienced, could actually lift the ocean floor, causing water to roll across the Pacific Ocean and crash into other shores many hours later.
Scientists said they had not developed any equipment at that time that could have detected such wave to be able to inform the people that something of such magnitude was heading their way.
However, with the help up technological advancement today, the world can boast of a lot of high-performance machines to detect impending natural disasters. Those instruments make up a global tsunami warning system. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean another major earthquake would be any less destructive.
The Deadly Earthquake That Hit Chile [VIDEO]https://youtu.be/cNkgyIRBBLQ
Sadly, Scientists still think there is a tendency for an earthquake as big as the Great Chilean Earthquake could occur on a number of faults including one along the northwest coast of the U.S., the Cascadia subduction zone. And that one is overdue for some major seismic activity. Hopefully, it does not happen.
