Earthquakes...more.

"Chilean television aired footage of collapsed buildings and bridges, cars buried under rubble and bloodied residents wandering dazed in front of fractured apartment houses. "Never in my life have I experienced a quake like this, it's like the end of the world," Reuters quoted a survivor as telling local TV in the city of Temuco, where the quake damaged buildings and forced staff to evacuate the regional hospital.

"We are in the process of finding out about the effects of the quake across the region, the state of the roads and hospitals, the damage to buildings and of course the number of those killed and injured," Bachelet told reporters before heading into an emergency meeting to fix downed communication lines. "We're doing everything we can with all the forces we have. Any information we will share immediately. Without a doubt, with an earthquake of this magnitude, there will be more deaths."

The U.S. Geological Survey put the temblor at an 8.8-magnitude, with two aftershocks within as many hours amounting to 6.2 and 5.4 magnitude each. A quake of magnitude 8 or above is considered a "great" earthquake that can cause "tremendous damage," according to the USGS Web site. By comparison, the earthquake that devastated Haiti's capital last month was rated a magnitude 7.0.

Because the scale is exponential, today's seismic event was about 500 times more powerful than the one in Haiti. How much damage an earthquake actually makes depends not only on magnitude but also on depth, local geology, population density and building codes.

"This quake is much larger [than in Haiti], and it's occurring in an area that has a history of generating large quakes in the past," Randy Baldwin, a geophysicist at the National Earthquake Information Center in Colorado, told AOL News. "I don't know if that [history] ultimately affected building codes [in Chile]. It's hard to project damage at this early stage."

Baldwin said the earthquake also created a huge wave at least four feet higher than normal along Chile's coast near the epicenter close to Concepcion, the country's second-largest city with some 200,000 residents.

Bachelet said a "wave of large proportions" hit the Juan Fernandez island group, with waters rising halfway into one inhabited area. If there are more aftershocks, people in coastal areas should try to escape to higher ground, she said. Her comments were carried by several news agencies.

"An earthquake of this size has the potential to generate a destructive tsunami that can strike coastlines near the epicenter within minutes and more distant coastlines within hours," the National Weather Service said in a statement.

Santiago's airport is closed, and all flights are being diverted to Mendoza in neighboring Argentina, the BBC reported.

Landlines are down but mobile phones with 3G Internet capacity are still working, a university professor in Santiago wrote in an email the BBC posted on its Web site. Another survivor wrote that the "roads are mad with traffic and everyone is out in streets fearing aftershocks."

Survivors also flocked to Twitter, using the micro-blogging site to search information about loved ones. Residents as far as northern Argentina, some 1,200 miles from the quake, said their houses shook. Some buildings were evacuated in Buenos Aires as well.

Chile holds the record for the largest earthquake in the world: a magnitude-9.5 that struck the south-central city of Valdivia in May 1960, killing 1,655 people and leaving 2 million others homeless. That quake also triggered a tsunami which battered Easter Island, 2,300 miles off Chile's coast, and killed people as far as Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines.

Today's quake came hours after a smaller 6.9-magnitude one in Japan, where an initial tsunami alert was also issued. There were no reports of major damage."

Click for AOL article.

And another one in Japan.

actually it's our country which is endangered to be hit with the strong tsunami

These recent Earthquakes and the resulting aftershocks have been terrible. Even way down here in Australia, we're fleeing for the hills on a Tsunami alert.
It's a terrible disaster, and it'll surely shake the world for quite a while.

I just hope the worst is over. Those poor people.

Red Riding Hood wrote:

These recent Earthquakes and the resulting aftershocks have been terrible. Even way down here in Australia, we're fleeing for the hills on a Tsunami alert.
It's a terrible disaster, and it'll surely shake the world for quite a while.

I just hope the worst is over. Those poor people.

we Filipinos are scared of the tsunami threat too but thank God it only reach 1 meter!