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Science 30 January 1981:
Vol. 211. no. 4481, pp. 441 - 445
DOI: 10.1126/science.211.4481.441
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Articles

The Great Tumaco, Colombia Earthquake of 12 December 1979

Darrell G. Herd 1, T. Leslie Youd 2, Hansjürgen Meyer 3, Jorge Luis Arango C. 4, Waverly J. Person 5, and Carlos Mendoza 5

1 Research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, California 94025
2 Research civil engineer with the U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, California 94025
3 Professor of geophysics, Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia
4 Geologist at the Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones, Geológico-Mineras, Bogotá, Colombia
5 Seismologists with the U.S. Geological Survey, Denver, Colorado 80225

Southwestern Colombia and northern Ecuador were shaken by a shal-low-focus earthquake on 12 December 1979. The magnitude 8 shock, located near Tumaco, Colombia, was the largest in northwestern South America since 1942 and had been forecast to fill a seismic gap. Thrust faulting occurred on a 280- by 130-kilometer rectangular patch of a subduction zone that dips east beneath the Pacific coast of Colombia. A 200-kilometer stretch of the coast tectonically subsided as much as 1.6 meters; uplift occurred offshore on the continental slope. A tsunami swept inland immediately after the earthquake. Ground shaking (intensity VI to IX) caused many buildings to collapse and generated liquefaction in sand fills and in Holocene beach, lagoonal, and fluvial deposits.


THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Seismicity associated with the great Colombia-Ecuador earthquakes of 1942, 1958, and 1979: Implications for barrier models of earthquake rupture.
C. MENDOZA and J. W. DEWEY (1984)
Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America 74, 577-593
   Abstract »    PDF »
Variable rupture mode of the subduction zone along the Ecuador-Colombia coast.
H. KANAMORI and K. C. MCNALLY (1982)
Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America 72, 1241-1253
   Abstract »    PDF »


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