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The earthquakes that shook Mexico City’s sense of time | Aeon Essays

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In Valle de Vázquez, Mexico, a resident watches his house being demolished, four days after the 19 September 2017 earthquake. Photo by Hector Vivas/Getty by Lachlan Summers + BIO In Valle de Vázquez, Mexico, a resident watches his house being demolished, four days after the 19 September 2017 earthquake. Photo by Hector Vivas/Getty is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where he is a member of the ‘Time Scales: Historicizing Deep Time’ working group. Edited byCameron Allan McKean Shortly before 7:19am on 19 September 1985, time began to shift in Mexico City. It started with a tremor, emerging from the subduction zone on the Pacific coast, about 300 km southwest of the metropolis. The magnitude 7.4 quake took less than a minute to travel through the surface of southern Mexico before arriving beneath the city. Amplified by soft soils, it reached magnitude 8.1, killing, according to government data, around 10,000 people (the real number i

Shortly before 7:19am on 19 September 1985, time began to shift in Mexico City. It started with a tremor, emerging from the subduction zone on the Pacific coast, about 300 km southwest of the metropolis. The magnitude 7.4 quake took less than a minute to travel through the surface of southern Mexico before arriving beneath the city. Amplified by soft soils, it reached magnitude 8.1, killing, according to government data, around 10,000 people (the real number is likely much higher – perhaps as many as 40,000 people), and immediately causing 400 buildings to collapse (3,000 would eventually be…

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