The Earthquake in Haiti

Republic of Haiti is spinning from a seven magnitude quake that hit ten miles of its sea-coast on early Tues 10 Jan’2010. Hapless communications are making it quite complex to at once appraise the extent of the harm as well as the human death figure, but as the daytime comes; a government official said the death toll from Tuesday’s 7.0-magnitude earthquake may exceed 100,000

Earthquakes typically occur along the jigsaw-puzzle pieces of Earth's crust, called plates, which move relative to one another, most of the time at an invisibly slow pace. In the case of the Haiti quake, the Caribbean and North American plates slide past one another in an east-west direction. This is known as a strike-slip boundary.

Major earthquakes are rare in this part of the world in part because the Caribbean is a minor plate, with a fault system that isn't as long as, which is at the boundary between two of the world's largest plates