Washington, July 26: The twin earthquakes that struck Venezuela last month caused massive devastation in Caracas and La Guaira as the earth shifted as much as 60 centimetres (two feet), data from the NASA-ISRO satellite NISAR has revealed.
Researchers studied the images of the Earth taken by the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) satellite on June 13 and 18 (before the quake) and on June 25 and 30 to detect the changes in the terrain after the June 24 earthquake.
This was the first time the NISAR urgent response system was used to map surface displacement from a large earthquake.
Scientists used a technique called InSAR, which compares data from repeat passes to detect subtle changes in the distance between the satellite and the ground, NASA said in a statement earlier this month.
Since the earthquake occurred on a strike-slip fault, the majority of the deformations were horizontal (east-west).
Particularly strong displacement was recorded south of the international airport in Caracas, where the surface shifted approximately 60 centimetres.
“These are reasons why the damage in Caracas and La Guaira was so extreme,” said Eric Fielding, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “InSAR tells us a lot about what happened during this earthquake,” he said. (PTI)
