Shake Up.

This year, planet Earth got off to a shaky--and deadly--start. On January 13, a mammoth earthquake registering 7.7 on the Richter scale (measurement of an earthquake's energy) centered about 105 kilometers (65 miles) off the coast of El Salvador in Central America. The quake jolted the country and rocked neighboring Guatemala and Mexico. A recorded 496 landslides caused a large percentage of the more than 700 reported human deaths.

Then on January 26, an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.7 struck India on Republic Day, the country's most important public holiday. Four hundred middle-school students taking part in a parade winding down the narrow streets of Anjar--a small town in the northwestern state of Gujarat--were buried by a torrent of falling buildings. Within 45 seconds, the town lay in ruins: Rescue workers later found only eight students alive.

The killer quake, along with hundreds of aftershocks (lesser earthquakes in the vicinity), reduced Gujarat's thousands of villages and cities to piles of rubble. Estimated death toll: 30,000 along with more than 146,000 injured, 1 million homeless, and damages possibly upward of $5.5 billion.

Scientists aren't surprised by India's massive quake. Earth's crust, or surface, is divided into tectonic plates (huge slabs of moving rock). Gujarat sits atop the junction of the Eurasian, Indian, and Arabian plates, explains seismologist (earthquake scientist) Waverly Person at the National Earthquake Information Center of the U.S. Geological Survey: "Plates can move along, duck under, or ride over one another." And faults, or fractures caused by the shifting of rocks in Earth's crust, can create enormous stress over time. When the stress in the fault exceeds the strength of the rocks, the slabs buckle and the energy can trigger a killer earthquake, says Person. Since Gujarat's last major earthquake occurred in 1819, "that's enough time to build up a lot of stress," he adds.

India's quake was the result of the strain in a thrust fault, in which one section of Earth's crust is pushed up over another. As for El Salvador, scientists believe a subducting fault (when sections of Earth's crust elbow each other, forcing the ocean floor to dip) occurred in the Caribbean plate.

What single factor produces so many deaths? In Gujarat, "most deaths were caused by the crumbling of very poorly constructed buildings," says Person. Rescue missions discovered the majority of local buildings failed to meet quakeproof construction standards. The Indian Government has now pledged to enforce stricter laws to rebuild Gujarat.

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