Lower half of South America, from the Falklands to the Pacific, shifted to the west

"The Maule earthquake will arguably become one of the, if not the most important, great earthquake yet studied."

Researchers show how far South American cities moved in quake

COLUMBUS, Ohio – The massive magnitude 8.8 earthquake that struck the west coast of Chile last month moved the entire city of Concepcion at least 10 feet to the west, and shifted other parts of South America as far apart as the Falkland Islands and Fortaleza, Brazil.

These preliminary measurements, produced from data gathered by researchers from four universities and several agencies, including geophysicists on the ground in Chile, paint a much clearer picture of the power behind this temblor, believed to be the fifth-most-powerful since instruments have been available to measure seismic shifts.

Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina and across the continent from the quake's epicenter, moved about 1 inch to the west. And Chile's capital, Santiago, moved about 11 inches to the west-southwest. The cities of Valparaiso and Mendoza, Argentina, northeast of Concepcion, also moved significantly.

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http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-03/osu-rsh030810.php

if those places shifted to the west, then a series of faults must have appeared somewhere to the east, in the atlantic - may all the way to the mid Atlantic ridge? The arrows also show a shear zone may be spreading north of Buenos Aires.

causing a big chunk of the Southern Cone to shift to the west.



It was strictly a Pacific Rim of Fire event.

Related: Yellow Alerts have been issued for two Chilean volcanos; the Villarica and the Llaima. Both have been acting up with vapor and gases emissions since the Feb. 26 earthquake to the north of them.

It's horrendous. HUGE. Never saw anything like the recent events.

Thank you for this information.

then this must have caused a tensile stress in the Atlantic. And this tensile stress leads to cracks appearing in the Atlantic. Since the main spreading center is at the mid Atlantic ridge, I suspect we may see the ridge spreading faster to make up the difference.

The volcanic activity is to be expected. When a large section of the sea floor is fed into the hot zone underneath the Andes, it melts, and because it is covered with sedimentary rocks which contains a high amount of water and carbon, it creates a very fizzy lava which rises very fast (so called andesite). I would expect volcanic activity to increase in due course.