Be prepared:
it’s impossible to predict an earthquake

International rumblings

In 2009 in L’Aquila, a city about 60 miles northeast of Rome, a severe earthquake killed over 300 people and left 60,000 homeless. In 2011 six Italian scientists and a government official were put on trial for manslaughter, with the prosecution alleging they had not properly communicated the risk of such a major earthquake occurring. They were found guilty and each sentenced to six years in prison and a huge fine. Following international outrage, the convictions were overturned on appeal two years later.

“If you allow people to believe we can predict earthquakes, they won’t do anything to make their lives safer.”

Professor James Jackson has spent his career studying earthquakes. He can tell you how the Earth’s continents are deforming, on scales from single fault lines to vast continental areas. Using space-based techniques combined with geological investigations he can identify where earthquakes will happen, how big they’ll be, and how long the shaking will last. But what he can’t do is predict when they’re going to occur – nobody can.

“We took the scientists from L’Aquilla to other countries at risk of earthquakes, including Kazakhstan, for them to tell the local politicians: ‘if you allow the public to believe you can predict earthquakes, this is what will happen’. That had a real impact,” says Jackson, in the University’s Department of Earth Sciences.

In earthquake-prone developed countries like Japan and New Zealand, even severe earthquakes cause very few deaths – they are mainly stories of economic loss. The design of buildings in these countries is regulated to ensure they are as earthquake-proof as possible, in preparation for the unexpected.

But throughout much of the Mediterranean­–Middle East–Central Asia earthquake belt, buildings are of low quality and have not been managed through building codes in the same way. Towns and cities near active faults are experiencing rapid population growth and urban development. Earthquakes here will kill tens, or hundreds of thousands of people.

Shaking things up

Realising this huge disparity led Jackson and his colleagues, Professor Keith Priestley and Dr Alex Copley in the University’s Department of Earth Sciences, to ask how they could use science to increase developing countries’ resilience to earthquake risk.

Together with Professor Philip England at the University of Oxford, the team had developed a long-term relationship with collaborators across the Mediterranean–Himalayan–Asian earthquake belt, many of whom advise their respective governments on earthquake hazard and risk. In 2012 they leveraged this relationship to establish ‘Earthquakes without Frontiers’ (EwF), a consortium jointly funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council, to support physical and social scientists working to increase resilience to earthquakes in Asian countries.

Cambridge research has shown that seismic risk is higher in continental interiors, where the network of geological faults is much less well defined, than at plate boundaries. Devastating earthquakes such as those in Bam, Iran (2003; 30,000 deaths), and Muzzafarabad, Pakistan (2005; 75,000 deaths), invariably take place on faults that were either previously unknown, or whose threat had not been recognised, making hazard assessment and development planning impossible.

At its heart, EwF uses science to help developing countries be better prepared for earthquakes. In Tehran, for example, work by EwF identified a new fault line, subsequently named the Pardisan fault. This was a major step in evaluating the earthquake hazard to this city of over 10 million people.

In another of its focus regions in north-west India, EwF identified an area at the entrance to the Kashmir valley at risk of a major earthquake at some point in the future. The likely effects of that earthquake will be to block all the roads and completely cut off the Kashmir valley.

 “We can’t say when it will happen, but when it inevitably does we can estimate how big it will be, where the shaking will be and how long it will last”

says Jackson, adding: “Long-term forecasting is a matter of understanding the local geology, what happened before, and how earthquakes work in that part of the world. Then there’s a lot you can do to prepare.”

Earthquakes in major cities today have a much bigger impact than in the past, in part because of their much bigger populations. In a two-year scientific study, EwF’s Nepalese partners forecasted the impacts of an earthquake in Kathmandu on public ‘lifelines’ including water supply, electricity, and phone networks, and created a picture book for the public showing the unfolding scenario day-by-day.

“Two years later the earthquake actually happened – and jeepers, you could just turn over the pages of the book and it was all accurate!” says Jackson. “That had a huge impact on the Chinese, who wanted us to do the same thing there.”

“Earthquakes without Frontiers was an experiment no-one had tried before”

says Jackson, adding: “We had the previous experience of working with people in all these different countries, and we wanted to see what happened if we tried to connect them all.”

What happened was that scientists in developing countries no longer felt that they were working alone. “In India, for example, we did a mixture of collaborative science, learning about the region to assess earthquake hazard and risk, and bringing in contacts from other developing countries in the EwF network to talk to Indian officials about contingency planning,” says Jackson. “That really helped the Indian scientists to be taken seriously and to influence those responsible for public safety.”