Cosmic Log - haiti

Jan

2011

2:48pm, EST

Froggy finds raise hopes for Haiti

Robin Moore / iLCP

The Macaya Breast-spot Landfrog was rediscovered during a post-quake expedition to Haiti, almost 20 years after the previous sighting. Click through a slideshow featuring the exotic "lost" frogs of Haiti.

By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

Conservationists have rediscovered six species of frogs in Haiti, offering a ray of hope for the country on the one-year anniversary of the earthquake that left it in shambles.

"I am very wary of highlighting frogs at this time in Haiti. Obviously the country has very pressing needs, but I think ultimately they are a symbol of something more hopeful," said Robin Moore, an amphibian expert with Conservation International who helped lead the expedition that found the frogs.

Among the highlights are a frog that calls like a ventriloquist that was last seen in 1991 and only known from a few individuals; a frog with unusually striking blue sapphire-colored eyes; and a frog that's the size of a grape, one of the smallest amphibians in the world. (Click through our slideshow featuring the cute little guys.)

Remote forest refuges
"A common assumption about Haiti is that there is nothing left to save," Moore said in a news release announcing the frog rediscoveries. "That is not entirely true. There are biologically rich pockets of environmental health and natural wealth in Haiti."

That said, less than 2 percent of Haiti's original forest remains, and the freshwater ecosystems on which Haitians depend are mostly degraded, according to the conservationists.

Moore and colleague Blair Hedges from Pennsylvania State University led an expedition to the mountains of southwestern Haiti to look for long-lost frogs. Over the course of eight days, they scoured the trees, riverbeds and ground for amphibians. They found 25 unique species out of the country's 49 known native species, including six critically endangered species not seen in at least a decade.

"We were hopeful that we would find some amphibians," Moore told me. "I was extremely surprised at just how many we found of these critically endangered species."

He added that the discoveries serve as an incentive to keep conservation efforts alive in the struggling country.

"As long as we have a decent patch of forest left, we have something to protect and something to build on," Moore said. "You have opportunities for developing alternatives such as shade-grown coffee, which is a very attractive alternative to current cash crops."

Search for lost frogs
The announcement of the six rediscovered frogs comes on the heels of a Conservation International expedition to western Colombia that scared up three previously unknown frog species.

The Colombian species include a long-nosed beaked toad that can camouflage itself as a dead leaf, an only-somewhat-poisonous rocket frog with flashes of red on its legs, and a red-eyed frog that's so mysterious scientists don't know exactly how to classify it.

Conservation International's expeditions to Colombia and Haiti expeditions are part of the group's "Search for Lost Frogs" campaign, which was launched in the summer of 2010 to locate frog species that have not been seen for at least a decade and are feared to be extinct. Conservation International and its partners at the Amphibian Specialist Group of IUCN plan to launch a new campaign later this year.

More species lost and found:

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Sep

2010

5:50pm, EDT

Why the N.Z. quake is no Haiti

David Alexander / NZPA via AP

A police officer stands on a street blocked by rubble following an earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand.

In January, a 7.0 quake hit Haiti, and 230,000 people died. Today, a 7.0 quake hit New Zealand, and early indications are that it caused relatively few serious casualties. Why the difference?

The main reasons don't have to do so much with the earthquakes themselves.

"This was very similar to the earthquake that struck Haiti," said Paul Caruso, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo. "The main difference is that New Zealand has a lot of experience with earthquakes, and they have good construction codes to make sure that their buildings withstand a strong earthquake."

In contrast, Haiti is one of the poorest nations in the world, was far less prepared to withstand a seismic shock. Building standards were virtually non-existent. The infrastructure simply couldn't withstand a quake, in a place that's more used to weathering hurricanes than seismic shocks. January's quake was the biggest to hit the island of Hispaniola since an 8.1 event in 1946.

Looking at it in purely geological terms, you could see lots of eerie similarities between the quakes in Haiti and New Zealand: Both involved strike-slip faults, meaning most of the shaking was side to side. Both were shallow, which is usually a bad sign for earthquake damage (8.1 miles for Haiti, 7.5 miles for New Zealand). Both were close to major population centers (25 miles from Port-au-Prince in Haiti, 35 miles from Christchurch in New Zealand).

Both events sparked some seismological intrigue: Scientists recently determined that the surprisingly strong Haiti quake occurred along a fault line that was previously undetected. The New Zealand quake occurred close to two well-known fault lines, the Alpine and the Hope faults. Seismologists have been particularly concerned about the Alpine Fault, which is known to have produced several quakes in the range of magnitude 8 over the past 900 years.

The New Zealand government's GNS Science agency recently said the Alpine Fault had a "high probability" of rupturing within 40 years. "The rupture will produce one of the biggest earthquakes since European settlement of New Zealand, and it will have a major impact on the lives of many people," the agency said. However, this doesn't appear to be New Zealand's Big One.

Caruso of the USGS said seismologists were still trying to reconstruct the exact cause of today's quake. "We think that this is a very complex event," he told me. "We think that the main shock may have consisted actually of three earthquakes."

Looking beyond the infrastructure, the other main reason why the casualties were so great in Haiti, and so few in New Zealand, had to do with the time of day. Haiti's 7.0 event came at 4:53 p.m., when lots of people were out in the streets of the city. New Zealand's came at 4:35 a.m., when most folks were home in bed. If you have to weather a 7.0 shock, that's not a bad place to be, Caruso told me.

"One of the worst things you can do in an earthquake is run outside, because stuff is falling down," he said. "If people stay in their houses, they're a lot safer."

It's way too early to say precisely how serious the quake's impact is: Reports of damage and injuries from the field don't typically flow in as fast as Twitter updates. (To keep up with the stream, search for the hashtag #eqnz. You can also check the minute-by-minute reports from the New Zealand Herald.)

Some New Zealanders are being evacuated, and others are encountering outages in electrical power as well as water and sewer service. The quake caused serious damage to buildings and transportation infrastructure, and it's clear that significant repair and rebuilding will be required in the months ahead.

But even at this early stage, it's also clear that New Zealand is no Haiti. Thank goodness.

More about earthquakes:

Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."