Artículos de revistas
Did a 3800-year-old M-w similar to 9.5 earthquake trigger major social disruption in the Atacama Desert?
Fecha
2022Registro en:
Sci. Adv. 8, eabm2996 (2022) 6 April 2022
10.1126/sciadv.abm2996
Autor
Salazar Sutil, Diego Rodrigo
Easton Vargas, Gabriel
Goff, James
Guendon, Jean L.
González Alfaro, José
Andrade, Pedro
Villagrán, Ximena
Fuentes Alburquenque, Mauricio Eduardo
León, Tomás
Abad, Manuel
Izquierdo, Tatiana
Power, Ximena
Sitzia, Luca
Álvarez, Gabriel
Villalobos, Ángelo
Olguín, Laura
Yrarrazaval Ascencio, Sebastián Alonso
González, Gabriel
Flores, Carola
Borie, César
Castro Rojas, María Victoria
Campos, Jaime
Institución
Resumen
Early inhabitants along the hyperarid coastal Atacama Desert in northern Chile developed resilience strategies
over 12,000 years, allowing these communities to effectively adapt to this extreme environment, including the
impact of giant earthquakes and tsunamis. Here, we provide geoarchaeological evidence revealing a major
tsunamigenic earthquake that severely affected prehistoric hunter-gatherer-fisher communities ~3800 years
ago, causing an exceptional social disruption reflected in contemporary changes in archaeological sites and
triggering resilient strategies along these coasts. Together with tsunami modeling results, we suggest that this
event resulted from a ~1000-km-long megathrust rupture along the subduction contact of the Nazca and South
American plates, highlighting the possibility of Mw ~9.5 tsunamigenic earthquakes in northern Chile, one of the
major seismic gaps of the planet. This emphasizes the necessity to account for long temporal scales to better
understand the variability, social effects, and human responses favoring resilience to socionatural disasters.