Chicago.– More massive quakes could hit Haiti and its neighbors after the devastating tremors this week that increased pressure along a lengthy fault line, scientists warned on Friday.

According to Paul Mann, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas at Austin, just because the rebuilding process had started people shouldn’t assume the risk was over.

"This relief of stress along this area near Port-au-Prince may have actually increased stress in the adjacent segments on the fault," he told the press.

Researchers have already begun to work on models to try to predict how the stress changes resulting from the 7.0-magnitude quake which struck Tuesday is affecting the adjacent segments of the fault.

"This fault system is hundreds of kilometers long and the segment that ruptured to form this ear quake is only 80 kilometers long," Mann said. "There are many more segments which are building up strain where there haven’t been earthquakes for hundreds of years."

"Potentially any one of these segments could cause an earthquake similar to that which happened in Haiti," he pointed out.

There are, thankfully, only two major population centers along the fault: Port-au-Prince and Kingston, Jamaica.But as demonstrated in the chaos which followed Tuesday’s tremor, the impact of a quake of that magnitude can be “paralyzing,” Mann said.

And there is a second fault system in the north of Haiti which extends to the Dominican Republic which has not ruptured in 800 years and has built up sufficient pressure for a 7.5 magnitude quake. "The question is when are those going to rupture," Mann said, adding that it is very difficult to predict "whether or not that’s going to happen next week or 100 years."