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ISBN: 978-0-230-11941-3
Musson, Roger.
The million death quake : the science of predicting Earth’s deadliest natural
disaster / Roger Musson.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-230-11941-3 (hardback)
1. Earthquake prediction. 2. Earthquakes. I. Title.
QE538.8.M87 2012
551.22—dc23
2012011137
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Acknowledgments ix
A Note about Units xi
Hotspots and Rogue Earthquakes xiii
Part 1
Problems
1 Screaming Cities 3
2 What Is an Earthquake, Anyway? 19
3 Journey to the Center of the Earth 49
4 Tracking the Unseen 73
5 How Big? How Strong? 97
6 The Wave that Shook the World 119
Part 2
Solutions
Notes 245
Index 251
1
Screaming Cities
the street, and everything started rocking. Then, from all around, came
the sound of breaking glass and then the baleful rumble of collapsing
masonry. And then screaming.
And dust. As the buildings caved in and turned to rubble, clouds of
dust rose into the air, a horrible yellowy-gray dust of powdered concrete
and cement. And it was everywhere. Buildings were collapsing across
the city, each sending up its own cloud of dust. A woman standing on
her balcony overlooking the city saw the clouds merge and the whole
city disappear in one huge rising cloud of dust. No streets, no build-
ings, no landmarks, just dust that obscured everything. But she could
hear the roar of collapsing buildings and the shrieks and screams. The
woman was already on the phone to a distant friend when the disaster
struck. She cried into the receiver, “It’s the end of the world!”
This was Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on January 12, 2010. The local time
was seven minutes to five in the afternoon.
Just over a month later, on February 27, the news once again was full of
stories about an earthquake, this time in Chile. A truly massive earth-
quake—hundreds of times larger than the Haiti earthquake—struck
off the coast of central Chile. The earth’s crust was violently displaced
by as much as ten meters as rocks were ripped apart for seven hundred
kilometers along the Chilean coast, devastation that took three minutes
from start to finish.
This huge earthquake proved a different story from the Haiti quake.
Once again the death toll started small, then gradually rose and rose—
and then came down again. From an estimate of 802, it declined to 521
as some people who had been marked as missing and presumed dead
turned out to be very much alive, having taken refuge with relatives
outside the disaster zone.
Chile is very different from Haiti. It may not be the richest coun-
try in the world, but it is not mired in poverty like Haiti. And, cru-
cially, everyone in Chile knows the country has an earthquake problem.
Screaming Cities 9
Earthquakes are common there. As a result buildings are routinely built
to withstand earthquakes. Even if Haiti had had the resources to make
buildings safer, no one in Port-au-Prince had ever felt an earthquake
there before, and people had no idea they were at risk.
These two quakes from early 2010 make an instructive comparison.
People sometimes imagine that the larger an earthquake is, the worse
it must be. In truth, many factors determine an earthquake’s impact.
The Haiti earthquake was something like the worst case imagin-
able. It was strong, and it was close to a major city. The Chilean quake
might have been larger, but it didn’t deliver the same concentrated
punch to one major city. And, most important, the Haitians were far
more vulnerable. They were not prepared.
An Australian geologist of my acquaintance, Ted Brennan, devised
his own personal scale of earthquake disaster potential, rating cities
from one to ten. This wasn’t based on frequency of earthquakes—al-
most the reverse. He would give a low rating to cities that have often
been exposed to earthquakes. The high ratings he awarded to cities that
had been hit in the past but well beyond living memory, places where
people were complacent in the belief that earthquakes were not their
problem. The last time Port-au-Prince had been destroyed by an earth-
quake was 1770, when it was a lot smaller. Who in modern Haiti knew
anything about that?
Chile might be a far more earthquake-prone country, but it was
prepared, and the preparations by and large did their work.
Haiti 2010 was one of the deadliest earthquakes on record, and
Chile 2010 was one of the largest. Oddly enough, if one tries to list the
largest quakes ever and the deadliest quakes ever, few appear on both
lists. But both Haiti’s and Chile’s were quakes for the record books, and
the Chile quake occurred with the harrowing accounts from Haiti still
fresh in everyone’s mind. It caused a lot of people to take notice. Two
disasters so close together. Could it be that earthquakes are becoming
more common?
10 The Million Death Quake
Pick up any volume of a third-rate fantasy trilogy and you should find,
somewhere at the front, a map of the fantasy land in which the story is
12 The Million Death Quake
reality the fault, which ran past their city and had been locked shut by
friction for centuries, was beginning to break apart.
In the early hours of December 26, the main earthquake struck with
terrific force. As in Port-au-Prince the destructive force of the earth-
quake struck buildings that were so weak they offered little resistance.
The main construction material was adobe, a sort of brick made out
of mud, which was plentiful in the vicinity. Even the imposing fortress
overlooking the city, the Arg-é Bam, a UNESCO World Heritage site,
was made of adobe. I spoke later to an engineer who had visited Bam
a few years before the earthquake. He described how in one street he
had picked up a couple of loose bricks he saw lying on the ground and
banged them together. Both turned to dust in his hands. Such weakly
made houses could never have stood up to strong earthquake shak-
ing, and across the city houses collapsed in on the sleeping inhabitants.
About a third of the population was killed and another third injured.
But Bam is not the only case of a village on a fault line that has
grown: consider Tehran. In the ninth century a.d. Tehran was a small
village nestled at the foot of the Elburz Mountains in northern Iran.
The mountainscape to the north changes abruptly to a fertile plain;
the line where the mountains seem to have been sheared off is another
fault—the North Tehran Fault—and it too is characterized by spring
waters that make settlement attractive. During the period of the Safavid
dynasty in the seventeenth century, Tehran became a royal residence,
and it was made the capital in 1795.
It remains the capital of Iran today, swollen to a population of
more than twelve million in the greater metropolitan area—four times
the size of Port-au-Prince and just as exposed to earthquake hazard.
Historical records show that major earthquakes occurred along either
the North Tehran Fault or one of the neighboring related faults in 855,
958, 1177, and 1834.2 The population of Tehran was relatively modest
even as late as 1834. Now that it is twelve million, what will be the im-
pact of the next Tehran earthquake?
Screaming Cities 15
The Megadeath
generally expected that some of one’s children, perhaps even the major-
ity, would not live for more than a year or two.
This pattern has led to a common misunderstanding, even amongst
people who should know better, that is worth correcting here. It in-
volves the meaning of the term life expectancy, or the average number
of years a newborn baby can be expected to live. In medieval times this
was about thirty. This has led to such occasional statements, in books
written by otherwise intelligent people, as, “At the age of thirty-five, he
was already an old man, given that the average age was only thirty.” Not
so. Imagine ten infants, six of whom die around the time of their first
birthday, with the remainder living to normal human old age and dy-
ing at seventy. Their average age at death is 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 70
+ 70 + 70 + 70 divided by 10, which is 28.6. But none of them actually
died at the age of twenty-eight. Averages can be misleading, particularly
when they are dealing with very disparate things, in this case babies and
old people.
In the nineteenth century improved hygiene and medicine dras-
tically lowered the infant death rate in Europe, but people were still
used to having large families to compensate for a high infant mortal-
ity rate. The result was a huge boom in population—children were
surviving to adulthood at a rate that far exceeded what was needed to
keep the population stable. This produced a large population surplus
that could not be accommodated. But a solution was available: emi-
gration. Those who could not find work or land to farm in Europe
simply took off for the Americas or Australia or Africa. Eventually the
European birthrate adjusted itself downward until it reached a level
at which the population was stable once more. In the twentieth cen-
tury the story repeated itself in the developing world: improvements
in medicine brought the infant death rate down, but the birthrate
remained high. The result was the same as in Europe: a huge popula-
tion surplus. The difference was that no vast open spaces remained to
emigrate to.
Screaming Cities 17
So what happens to the population surplus in the developing
world? The rural economies of Africa and India can support only so
many, so once again some sort of migration has to occur. Some of it is
external, not in the form of colonization of undeveloped open spaces
but as economic migration to developed countries. But much of it also
takes the form of internal migration from the countryside to cities, as if
the cities were not expanding enough already.
Thus the global population is increasing at a rapid rate, and the
increase is disproportionately in the urban population of the develop-
ing world. Given that these internal migrations are generally of people
with few or no economic resources, cities end up with a vast sprawl of
overcrowded housing of poor quality.
The statistics show it clearly. Since 1960 the overall world popula-
tion has increased from about three billion to six billion, whereas the
urban population has increased from less than half a billion worldwide
to about five times that, and rising. Meanwhile the size of the rural
population has flattened out and is even declining. Developed nations
account for only about a sixth of the world’s population.
These vast concentrations of people in the cities of the developing
world can be vulnerable targets for natural disasters. One example is
Turkey. Since 1960 there has been a persistent pattern of people packing
their things, moving away from the villages in the Turkish countryside
where their families lived for generations, and moving to the indus-
trialized northwest of the country in search of jobs and better living
conditions. In response, a great deal of housing was thrown up around
Istanbul, and to the east and southeast, to accommodate the influx. And
“thrown up” is all too accurate a description of the sort of building that
took place.
Typically the new urban migrants moved into small apartment
blocks of five stories, built in a hurry and built as cheaply as possible,
using poor-quality construction materials. Reinforcing rods often were
any old bits of rusty iron that had been lying around—never mind
18 The Million Death Quake
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