3,800 years ago, a Mega Earthquake forced people to leave Chile’s coastal region for a thousand years!

There are natural catastrophes which are remembered for hundreds of years and impact several generations. One such remarkable event is the earthquake triggered by a gigantic tsunami that hit northern Chile 3,800 years ago that devastated the population on the coasts. So deep was its effect, says an article in sciencealert.com that following the quake, people returned to the shore only after 1,000 years!

This mega quake would have a magnitude of 9.5 and so potent it was that boulders were hurled in New Zealand’s inland even though it was thousands of miles away.

The occurrence of this event is proved by the uplifted land structures or what is called littoral deposits and discovery of marine rocks, shells and sea life in Chile’s higher regions of Atacama Desert.

Sharing details on this, James Goff who is a geologist and tsunami expert from Australia’s University of New South Wales said: "We found evidence of marine sediments and a lot of beasties that would have been living quietly in the sea before being thrown inland. And we found all these very high up and a long way inland so it could not have been a storm that put them there."

The group of researchers who found this were led Diego Salazar, an anthropologist from University of Chile and this team worked for years in the Atacama Desert – a region which has been prone to megathrust earthquakes due to the conjunction of Nazca and South American tectonic plates in which the former is subducting under the latter.

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