MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
Tuesday, August 11th 2026 - 10:11 UTC
“The Venezuelan earthquakes are shallower and involve a different mechanism, a strike-slip mechanism. This one is deeper, a subduction earthquake,” a seismologist stressed
The magnitude 7.4 earthquake that struck western and central Colombia on Monday has a different tectonic origin from the earthquakes recorded in Venezuela in June, despite comparable magnitudes, said Viviana Dionisio, a seismologist with Colombia's National Seismological Network.
“It was a tectonic earthquake associated mainly with a subduction mechanism,” the specialist said. That process occurs when the Nazca plate, beneath the Pacific Ocean, slides under the South American plate, on which Colombia's mainland territory sits. Energy accumulated at the contact between the two can be released in large earthquakes, of the kind historically recorded around the Pacific Ring of Fire.
