An Atacama Super-Quake We Never Knew About Sent Humans Into Hiding For 1,000 Years

It took 1,000 years for humans to return to the shore after the huge earthquake that struck northern Chile 3,800 years ago.

The ancient earthquake was so powerful that it generated a giant wave that hit New Zealand and was thousands of miles away.

The discovery can be seen in the uplifted land structures and samples of marine rocks, shells, and sea life washed into the higher stretches of the Atacama Desert. It serves as a grim warning of the destructive potential of major earthquakes that may have previously escaped our notice.

A lot of beasties that would have been living quietly in the sea before being thrown inland were found.

It could not have been a storm that put them there, because we found them very high up and a long way inland.

There are deposits in a trench. The University of Hampshire.

Due to its proximity to the South American tectonic plates, the Atacama Desert region is particularly vulnerable to megathrust earthquakes.

The most powerful earthquake on record, the 1960 Valdivia earthquake in southern Chile, was caused by this phenomenon and its seismic backlash; thousands of years prior, it seems the same tectonic tensions led to an equally diabolical yet undocumented precursor in the north of the country.

It had been thought that there could not be an event of that size in the north of the country.

We have found evidence of a massive rupture that is about one thousand kilometers off the coast of the Atacama Desert.

The researchers used radiocarbon dating to get a sense of the age of the littoral deposits.

The researchers wrote in their paper that they found evidence of atectonic event that would have caused a paleotsunami and caused social disruption at a regional scale.

A stone structure has collapsed. Gabriel Easton.

The people living in this part of the world were hunter-gatherers. The stone structures were destroyed by a strong current of tsunami backwash as it flowed back out to the sea, according to archaeological evidence.

The effects on people who survived the disaster were long-term, with evidence suggesting that the area remained empty for as long as 1,000 years.

The local population there were left with nothing.

With time and the passing of many generations, the local people became bolder, and eventually made their way back to the ocean.

The abandonment of previously occupied areas and changes in the mobility patterns and spatial arrangements of settlements and cemeteries were probably resilience strategies developed by hunter-gatherer societies.

However, knowledge of these giant events and their consequences seems to have waned over time.

The research is a warning about the risks of megathrust earthquakes in the future, as it fills the gaps in our historical understanding of the event.

While this had a major impact on people in Chile, the South Pacific islands were not used to being hit by waves.

They are all well-populated now, and many are popular tourist destinations, so when such an event occurs next time the consequences could be catastrophic unless we learn from these findings.

Science Advances contains the findings.