The risk of a new earthquake may have increased in an area of Chile's Pacific coast that suffered a massive quake and tsunamis last year that killed more than 500 people, a team of scientists said.
They said the 8.8 magnitude February 27 quake had only partly broken stresses, deep in the Earth's crust in an area south of Santiago, that have been building up since an 1835 quake witnessed by British naturalist Charles Darwin.
"We conclude that increased stress on the unbroken patch may in turn have increased the probability of another major to great earthquake there in the near future," they wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience.
A "major" earthquake is between magnitude 7 and 8, causing serious damage over large areas, and a "great" earthquake above 8. Chile's quake was the most powerful since the 2004 quake that caused a devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean.
"It's impossible to predict exactly when a new quake might happen," Stefano Lorito, of Italy's Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, told Reuters. He led a team of experts in the United States, Northern Ireland and Italy.
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