This map shows the risk of earthquakes for areas in the  Caribbean.

And this is the same map showing Haiti more closely

And this map shows where the first earthquake struck, and the following map shows one of the aftershocks.  The capital city Port-a-Prince is labeled on the second map.

Those are ‘shake maps’, estimates of how severe the shaking was.  The dark red is ten, or X, and here’s what the key says:

VIII - Drivers have trouble steering. Tall structures such as towers,
monuments and chimneys may twist and fall. Wood frame houses that
are not bolted to their foundations may shift and sustain serious
damage.  Damage is slight to moderate in well-constructed buildings,
considerable in poorly constructed buildings. Branches are broken and
fall from trees.  Changes occur in flow or temperature of springs and
wells. Cracks appear in wet ground and on steep slopes. 

IX - Masonry structures and poorly constructed buildings suffer serious
damage or collapse. Frame structures, if not bolted, shift off
foundations. Serious damage to reservoirs.  Underground pipes broken.
Conspicuous cracks in the  ground. In alluvial areas, sand and mud
ejected and sand craters are formed.

X - Most masonry and frame structures destroyed along with their
foundations.  Some well-built wooden structures and bridges are
destroyed.  Serious damage to dams, dikes, and embankments. Large
landslides occur.  Water thrown on the banks of canals, rivers and
lakes.  Sand and mud shift horizontally on beaches and flat land.
Rails bent.

Those mountains are huge, four thousand feet.  So the population is more densely packed than this map suggests.

You can see there is an extremely densely populated valley crossing the peninsula very close to the epicenter of the first quake.  But that doesn’t really agree with this population map, which I tend to trust more since they care more about how population is actually distributed.

The contour lines, in blue, on this map, are at thousand foot intervals.

Ok, here is a profesional effort to estimate the population exposure.  Click here to see the map.

As usual the Globe’s Big Picture has excellent coverage.

Shortly after Katrina NOAA took detailed arial photographs of the entire gulf coastline and put them up on the web.  Does anybody knows of a similar effort for Haiti?

This passionate posting over at Daily Kos caught my attention.  So I’m trying to understand the  fundamentals  a bit more and ignore the passion.  The first image shows a warm current of ocean water sweeping up the west coast of Greenland.  The posting suggests this is tied up in the recent snows in England and makes the usual suggestive tie to global warming.  All in all it made me curious.

This first map shows the major currents of the North Atlantic.  If you look at the eastern sea board of the US you’ll see the gulf stream, in warm red, flowing up the coast.  Below that a cold blue stream of water flows south.  The Gulf stream begins life in the Gulf of Mexico, while the cold current begins along the coast of  Labrador.

You’ll notice that the Gulf stream pumps a lot of warmth into the ocean around England, Iceland, Norway.  The trade wind plays a key role in that.  (Read about the North Atlantic Oscillation to get a feel for the drivers of those trade winds.)    The winds sweep west to east across the seas south of Iceland drawing warmth from the Gulf stream depositing it into British Isles, and Europe.

The second map shows the currents in more detail.  You can see that some of of the gulf splits off and is drawn up around the tip of Greenland and then along up the west coast of Greenland.

These days we have  satellites  that can report on the  temperature  of the sea’s surface, so called SST.  And that can then be plotted either by  temperature SST, or by how much the temp has varied from the usual SSTA. In the alphabet of worry A is for  anomaly.  The third map shows how much the surface temp. is anomalous compared to the seasonal average.  Uou can see the current that wraps the bottom of Greenland is about one degree warmer than usual.  That map is for Jan 6th.  You can keep an eye on it if you want, there are some cool animations there, but not of the anomalies.

But I suspect that this happens when ever they get a serious round of cold weather in Europe.  It does presumably increase the ongoing of glacier retreat along west coast of Greenland.

The nightmare scenario is that the Gulf stream stops warming Europe.  But the story above starts with a cold spell in Europe; not the other way around.  I can build scenarios with positive feedback loops in them using only the above; but they seem pretty  tenuous  and uninformed to me.