Earthquake hazards: vulnerability and threats in megacities

Introduction

Geographers are often asked if earthquakes are more disastrous now than they were in the past. According to Professor James Jackson (University of Cambridge) over the last 1000 years, there have been 110 earthquakes that each killed more than 10,000 people. Over 30 of these have happened in the last century.

The answer to the question is obviously 'yes', and in fact the dramatic increase in such disastrous earthquakes has been since about 1600. The effect is not caused by any change in the natural behaviour of our planet, as the earthquakes themselves are no more or less frequent now than they ever were, but is related to the way we now live and, in particular, to the dreadful vulnerability of megacities in the developing world.

We are delighted to host two archive academic articles written by Professor Jackson.

The first article focuses on the association between water supply in arid regions and the growth of settlements in tectonically vulnerable locations. Professor Jackson considers earthquakes which devastated desert towns and villages such as Sefidabeh in southeast Iran (1994) and Bam (2003).

The second article is a chapter entitled 'Surviving natural disasters' published in 'Survival, the survival of the human race' (CUP, 2008).

We are grateful to the publishers for granting permission for these articles to be made available to teachers and students on the Geography Southwest website and include the following statements as requested.

'Fatal attraction: living with earthquakes, the growth of villages into megacities, and earthquake vulnerability in the modern world' was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. This is reproduced with permission from Jackson J. (2006) Fatal attraction: living with earthquakes, the growth of villages into megacities, and earthquake vulnerability in the modern world. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A. 364 1911–1925 http://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2006.1805

James Jackson “Surviving natural disasters” pp. 123-145 in Emily Shuckburgh (Ed.), Survival, The Survival of the Human Race © Darwin College 2008, published by Cambridge University Press.

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