Earthquakes in Haiti: Live Map & the 2010 Disaster

Haiti sits on the boundary between the Caribbean and North American tectonic plates, cut through by the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault, a major strike-slip transform fault running east-west across the country's southern peninsula. This is the fault that ruptured in the catastrophic 12 January 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake, magnitude 7.0, which killed an estimated 220,000 to 316,000 people — one of the deadliest earthquakes ever recorded.

The 2010 earthquake was so lethal largely because of where and how it struck: a shallow rupture centred near Léogâne, only about 25 km west of the densely packed capital, Port-au-Prince, where decades of unregulated construction left millions of people in buildings with no seismic reinforcement at all. Haiti had almost no seismic monitoring network before 2010, and the fault had not produced a major rupture there since the 18th century, so the risk had gone largely unrecognised for generations.

The danger has not passed. On 14 August 2021, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck south-western Haiti's Nippes department, on a fault segment near — but distinct from — the one that ruptured in 2010, killing more than 2,200 people. Seismologists still consider parts of the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden system, including sections closer to Port-au-Prince, capable of rupturing again. Haiti's Bureau des Mines et de l'Énergie now works with international partners to expand seismic and GPS monitoring, but limited infrastructure and extreme poverty continue to make the country one of the world's most vulnerable to earthquake disaster.