Geologists are discovering that the Earth is not as elastic as they have previously though it to be and in turn has been permanently deformed.
Although earthquakes can leave the Earth in shambles, more than a century of research suggested that the planet rebounds after Earthquakes, with the crust springing back like elastic over the course of months to decades according to TheHollywoodGossip.com.
Structural geologist Richard Allmendinger of Cornell University has said that the earthquakes of magnitude 7 or greater caused the crust in northern Chile to crack permanently forever deforming that part of the earth's crust.
Allmendinger traveled to Chile with his graduate students to study other features but when he was taken to the region in which the cracks from earthquakes were well-exposed he just had to explore it.
According to NBC News the record of the vast number of earthquakes captured in northern Chilean rocks allowed the researchers to examine their average behavior over a longer period of time, which made it easier to pick out any patterns.
The researchers discovered that a small but significant 1 to 10 percent of the deformation of the Earth caused by 2,000 to 9,000 major quakes over the past 800,000 to 1 million years was permanent.
With the dry crust in places like the Atacama Desert scientist are allowed to virtually have a unique record of earthquakes going back a million years.
The study that was published in the Journal Nature Geoscience on April 28th questioned the previous studies about quakes done by geophysicists.
"Their models generally assume that all of the upper-plate deformation related to the earthquake cycle is elastic - recoverable, like an elastic band - and not permanent."
However Allmendinger's team of researchers concluded that the crust may behave less elastically than previously thought.