The Geographer: Earthquakes (summer 2023)

The

Geographer Summer 2023

The magazine of

the Royal Scottish Geographical Society

Earthquakes

Turkey, Syria, and the Human and Political Aftershocks “Deep under our feet the Earth holds its molten breath, while the bones of countless generations watch us and wait.”

Isaac Marion (Warm Bodies)

• Lyse Doucet: Finding Light in the Dark • DEC Turkey–Syria Earthquake Appeal • Earthquake Geology and Geography • Magnitudes, Modelling and Maps • Plate Movements and Political Impacts • Richard Else, Filmmaker • Chile, Comrie and Tomorrow’s Cities • Wild Isles and Winter Mountaineering • Reader Offer: Humankind

plus news, books and more...

The

Geographer

earthquakes

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elcome to this edition of The Geographer, and thank you to the many readers who have taken the time to praise our magazine – we are very grateful for your feedback.

Many of us will be familiar with Turkey as a popular holiday destination. This large country on the doorstep of Europe, the gateway to Asia, straddles the boundary between two great continents. But that boundary of course is not just a cultural and a political shift, but a physical plate boundary too and, as such, a hotspot for seismic activity. The recent dreadful magnitude 7+ earthquakes have been predicted for some time, but the event was still a shock. Precisely when such tremors occur and, to a degree, the likely scale and severity of them, is still beyond our abilities of prediction.

Whilst we can prepare, we cannot avoid earthquakes. The quakes in February were powerful, fairly close to the Earth’s surface, and in populous and poor regions of Turkey and Syria, so the impact was extreme. They weren’t the most powerful earthquakes this century, or the most destructive, but they were among the most severe.

In Turkey, this has been devastating. For Syrians clinging on in bombed-out towns and villages, suffering the impact of a decadelong civil war, or displaced and crammed into tents and dreaming of safety on a Turkey/Syria border, it is catastrophic.

Whilst NGOs, governments and international agencies rush to assist the immediate human crisis, the impact of the earthquake continues to ripple out. As I write this, the increasingly authoritarian Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan, widely criticized for a slow and inept response to the disaster, faces a crucial election. I wonder whether, if he wins, Turkey may slip further from democracy, or if the earthquakes make a difference and destabilise his regime. And in Syria, might the earthquakes’ devastating impact on top of a never-ending civil war be the trigger to force President Bashar al-Assad’s regime to relent? Syria needs all the help it can get right now.

The fact, occurrence and frequency of earthquakes are classically physical aspects of geography and geology. But as the various magnitude measures increasingly reflect, the story of earthquakes is more often about their impact, which is at the nexus of human and physical geography. We hope you find these articles informative.

Mike Robinson, Chief Executive, RSGS RSGS, Lord John Murray House, 15-19 North Port, Perth, PH1 5LU tel: 01738 455050 email: enquiries@rsgs.org

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www.rsgs.org Charity registered in Scotland no SC015599 The views expressed in this newsletter are not necessarily those of the RSGS. Cover image: İskenderun, Hatay, Türkiye, 7th February 2023. © Doğa Ayberk Demir from Shutterstock.

Masthead: Wildflower machair at RSPB Balranald Nature Reserve, North Uist. © Jake Stephen (rspb-images.com)

RSGS: a better way to see the world

James Cheshire FRSGS, Bartholomew Globe winner In April, we were delighted to present our Bartholomew Globe to James Cheshire, Professor of Geographic Information and Cartography in the UCL Department of Geography, for expertly demonstrating the value of storytelling through maps to help visualise some of the world’s most pressing challenges.

With Oliver Uberti, joint winner of the Bartholomew Globe, he has co-authored three critically acclaimed books: London: The Information Capital; Where the Animals Go; and Atlas of the Invisible, showing that good innovative cartography is as relevant today as it has always been. James’s work has included investigations into the use of cycle hire schemes, the spatial analysis of surnames, and new ways of visualising population data.

Receiving his award from RSGS Trustee Margaret Wilkes, during his talk at RSGS headquarters in Perth, James said, “Oliver and I are delighted to receive the RSGS Bartholomew Globe. For generations, the Bartholomews shared the wonder of the world through their pioneering atlases and taught us the power of maps. To be associated with them and recognised by the RSGS in this way is a true honour.”

Inspiring People 2022–23

On Thursday 30th March, we hosted the last talk of our Inspiring People programme for 2022–23, with adventurer and explorer Alice Morrison in Helensburgh.

Thank you to everyone who joined us at our talks this season, and for your ongoing support throughout, as we hosted face-to-face talks for the first time since lockdown.

We also held six online talks this year, with Lewis Pugh, Jojo Mehta, Robin Hanbury-Tenison, Myrtle Simpson, John Blashford-Snell and David Hempleman-Adams.

Look out for these talks on our YouTube channel.

We are now planning our next programme, which will start in September. Please contact us at enquiries@ rsgs.org if you would like to suggest possible future speakers.

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Summer 2023

Lyse Doucet FRSGS, Mungo Park Medallist In March, we were delighted to host BBC Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet at a special sell-out event at AK Bell Library in Perth, where she was interviewed by RSGS Vice-President Dr Vanessa Collingridge in front of a rapt audience.

Lyse was presented with the RSGS Mungo Park Medal, in recognition of her role as one of the most outstanding frontline broadcast journalists of the past few decades. Jeremy Bowen FRSGS and Lindsey Hilsum FRSGS, both Mungo Park Medallists themselves, sent their congratulations, highlighting how the depth of Lyse’s humanity shows in the relationships she forges through her reporting.

Lyse’s career as a globally recognised journalist reads as a geographical almanac of many of the world’s crisis areas over the last 30 years. She has covered all the major wars in the Middle East since the mid-1990s, and played a leading role in the BBC’s coverage of the Arab Spring. More recently, she reported from Kabul airport in August 2021 following the coalition withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban offensive in the country, and in 2022 and 2023 she has covered the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the emerging civil war in Sudan.

See pages 20–21 for an article by our Writer-in-Residence Jo Woolf.

Meredith McDonald

Leo Hickman FRSGS In April, we were very pleased to present RSGS Honorary Fellowship to Leo Hickman for his role as Director and Editor of Carbon Brief, a UK-based website covering the latest developments in climate science, climate policy and energy policy.

Leo previously worked for 16 years as a journalist, editor and author at The Guardian newspaper. Before joining Carbon Brief in 2015, he was WWF-UK’s chief advisor on climate change.

At Carbon Brief, he specialises in creating clear, data-driven articles and graphics to help improve the understanding of climate change, in terms of both the science and the policy response.

Our wonderful visitor centre reopened to the public on 11th May 2023, with an exhibition by Perth College UHI’s art students. The Fair Maid’s House is a geographical delight. You can watch the continents evolve in the Earth Room, and examine some fascinating maps on display in the Cuthbert Room. In the atmospheric Explorers’ Room, you can browse through atlases and journals, dip into the autobiographies of some remarkable people, and be inspired to plan your next holiday. So we are very grateful to Ordnance Survey for donating a new complete set of Explorer Maps of Scotland.

These maps display footpaths, car parks, contour lines, campsites, pubs, and more, so are great for planning mini-adventures.

Over the summer, we plan to open the Fair Maid’s House from 12:30pm to 4:00pm every Thursday, Friday and Saturday. So please come along and visit us – we look forward to welcoming you all back to the Geographical Heart of Scotland!

Opening Hours 2023 12:30pm to 4:30pm Thursday to Saturday

Turkey’s presidential election On 14th May, Turkey held its presidential and parliamentary elections. As we go to print, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his main rival, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, are going head-to-head in a runoff election, after neither candidate managed to achieve the 50% threshold to win the presidential race outright.

Erdoğan has dominated 21st-century Turkish politics, but his support has ebbed in recent years due to his increasing authoritarianism, an acute cost-of-living crisis, and wide criticism about his government’s response to the earthquakes, mishandling search and rescue efforts and failing to implement adaptation and resilience measures in earlier years.

Sea level changes as triggers A study undertaken in Armutlu peninsula, on the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara in Turkey, has shown that small fluctuations in sea level are enough to trigger earthquakes with a magnitude of up to 4.5, due to the small stresses that these fluctuations cause.

Scientists monitored seismic activity and variations in sea level in the region over six months, and found that the likelihood of earthquakes increased significantly when the sea level was rising. This effect was amplified in the winter months, when the variations in sea level were greater.

Patricia Martínez-Garzón, lead author of the paper published in Geophysical, said, “The sea level changes in the Sea of Marmara are small, up to 0.8 metres, so the fact that these small changes result in earthquakes indicates that these faults only need a small kick to rupture.”

earthquakes

At RSGS’s Annual General Meeting in March, we were pleased to see the reappointment of Meredith McDonald (née Adams) for a second three-year term of office as a Trustee and Board member.

During her first term, Meredith was an invaluable contributor to the Society’s development, being particularly active in promoting equality and diversity, and recommending medals and fellowships. In her second term, she hopes to further develop plans to bring the work of the RSGS to new audiences and embody the idea that geography is for everyone.

Fair Maid’s House

come and visit!

2 Summer 2023

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Local talks volunteer

Our collections to the fore!

When I was about 16, I decided to take on Duke of Edinburgh Gold, as a direct entrant. I was advised not to, but I did anyway and it changed my life totally. I found an unstoppable passion for the outdoors, but also a grit and determination I didn’t know I had. I just loved that feeling of completing a brutal journey, and it was exactly what I needed at that time in my life.

Margaret Wilkes FRSGS, RSGS Collections Team It’s the custom for members of our Collections Team to put out a special display for visitors to RSGS headquarters.

In February, our challenge was to find for David Henderson FRSGS, Chief Executive of Ordnance Survey (OS), a very unusual OS map we hoped he’d never seen before. We succeeded with an OS map of Canton, China, found in a British War Office Handbook of 1929!

After studying history at university, I’d spent the better part of four years tied to a desk, and I was itching to get back to the outdoors. Sadly, I’d allowed that part of my life to slip while I was at university. Thankfully, my brother convinced me to apply for a five-week expedition to the Indian Himalayas with the British Exploring Society (BES). It was five weeks of mountain climbing, scaling glaciers and conducting scientific research.

I was determined to do as much charity work as I could for BES to provide bursaries for new members who couldn’t afford the trips. I ran 10km a day for ten consecutive days to raise money, and was invited to be part of a small team to help develop the charity.

book a talk

When I moved back to Perth, I contacted the Royal Scottish Geographical Society to see if they had any space for new volunteers. Thankfully they did! My role is to be a public speaker for RSGS at events and for interested groups. I will help spread the history, story and message to as many people as I can. RSGS has so many incredible talks throughout the year and we actively want to market these to help inspire people. Being a part of the community and spreading the message is a vital part of RSGS and I’m genuinely so proud to be a part of it!

If you are interested in booking Graham to talk to a local Rotary or similar community group, please get in touch by emailing enquiries@rsgs.org in the first instance, or by telephoning 01738 455050.

Help name our new medal To address a perceived gap in awards for outstanding creative contributions to geographical understanding, RSGS Board has agreed to add a new medal to our suite of honours (listed at www.rsgs.org/Pages/Category/medallists).

The new medal will be awarded for contributions to geography through written, broadcast and creative media, both public and in regard to RSGS publications (for example, best book, best documentary, best article, etc).

Board has also agreed that the new medal should be named after a notable woman, to counter the lack of female representation amongst RSGS awards: there are currently seven awards named after men, and only two named after women – Marion Newbigin and Joy Tivy.

We are inviting members and supporters to suggest suitable role models in the creative arts or cultural worlds, after whom our new medal might be named. If you would like to propose a suitable name, please email enquiries@ rsgs.org before the end of July.

In early March, we were thrilled to welcome Lyse Doucet to our headquarters. We put out a personal display of maps featuring some of the places she’d reported from, including Afghanistan, and, to mark her French–Canadian roots in Bathurst, New Brunswick, a fine late-17th-century map of then French Canada

by Guillaume de l’Isle, then France’s Premier Géographe du Roi. In late March, we arranged a special display of material relating to Sir Ernest Shackleton, briefly Secretary of RSGS 1904–05, for the Endurance22 team which located the wreck of Shackleton’s world-famous ship Endurance. It made our afternoon, and theirs, to find we had two photographs relating to Endurance they had never seen before, one of which greatly aided their research.

In late April, for Professor James Cheshire, we were delighted to fetch out at his special request a copy of renowned Edinburgh mapmaker and publisher Alexander Keith Johnston’s magnificent Physical Atlas of Natural Phenomena (1856 edition) which contains exceptionally fine and innovative thematic maps.

We are so pleased to have had the chance to show these items to our visitors. To see glimpses of unusual maps in our Collections, view our monthly Memorable Maps blog on the RSGS website (www.rsgs.org/Blogs/view-point), which features maps chosen personally by members of our team.

Syria rejoins Arab League Arab states are rebuilding diplomatic relations with Syria by ending its exile from the Arab League after more than a decade.

Syria’s membership was revoked after President Bashar al-Assad ordered a brutal crackdown on protests against his rule, which descended into a civil war that killed more than 500,000 people and displaced half of the country’s population. President Assad has since received an invitation to attend the COP28 climate talks in Dubai later this year, but not without controversy.

Access to Inspiration podcasts listen and enjoy

RSGS is partnering with Access to Inspiration (accesstoinspiration.org) to record a series of podcasts focused on climate solutions and encouraging people to be more actively climate conscious. A range of guests will share their insights on ways to create a more sustainable future. There will be six 30-minute episodes, released weekly on Wednesdays from 14th June to 19th July, and featuring Dr Bertrand Piccard, JoJo Mehta, Roisin Hyde, Professor Iain Stewart, Professor Dame Anne Glover, and our own Mike Robinson.

As podcast host Sue Stockdale commented, “our podcast provides access to diverse voices, inspirational stories, and broader perspectives, which can help listeners to reflect on their views of the world, what they can achieve and how they can be inspirational. The world faces many challenges and people need inspiration to believe they can have a positive impact. This partnership will provide opportunities to share inspirational messages about creating a more sustainable future.”

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New tsunami warning system

In 2021, the roving editorship of the Society’s long-standing academic journal transferred from Dan Clayton and Charles Warren of the University of St Andrews to Chris Philo, Martin Hurst, Emma Laurie and Rhian Thomas of the University of Glasgow.

Scientists have developed a new early warning system for tsunamis and earthquakes. By combining technology from underwater microphones (hydraphones) with artificial intelligence, a team at Cardiff University has been able to monitor the movement of tectonic plates in real time. Dr Usama Kadri, the study’s co-author and senior lecturer in Applied Mathematics, said, “Our study demonstrates how to obtain fast and reliable information about the size and scale of tsunamis by monitoring acoustic-gravity waves.

[They] travel through the water much faster than tsunami waves, enabling more time for evacuation of locations before landfall.”

The new editors took the opportunity to revise the journal’s look and content. free access In their introductory editorial, ‘In the for members critical department’: refreshing the Scottish Geographical Journal (available at www. tandfonline.com/toc/rsgj20/138), they explained their wish to encourage contributions: • in a wide variety of possible forms and formats; • from academic scholars, and from people working with geographical ideas or techniques outwith academia; • from academics at all career stages.

The revised SGJ may include: Standard Academic Papers submitted by academic, professional or independent-scholar geographers, on any geographical subject-matter, from any theoretical position, with any methodological approach; Position Papers, entailing short, pithy, polemical statements about academic subfields, concepts, methods, ethics, practices, politics of (and beyond) the academy, and more; ExPosition Papers allowing authors to write at length, substantively, conceptually or in critical-review mode, in a manner rarely possible elsewhere; Scottish Landforms Examples (SLaX), presenting and explaining exemplar landforms in an approachable way for anyone with an interest in physical geography; Scottish Locales Examples (SLoX), comprising a human geography-facing parallel to the SLaX; Applied Geographies contributions from independent scholars, policy-makers, professional practitioners, artists and ‘creatives’, advocates and activists, and other ‘voices’; Teaching Geographies contributions from university staff, school-teachers or others discussing school-level geography or providing capsular accounts of geographical subject-matters; SGJ Archival Reviews based on the extensive ‘back issues’ archive of the SGJ which is now easily accessible and searchable from the journal website; Extended Book Review Essays in place of standard book reviews, as an attractive option for making serious contributions to our disciplinary literatures.

One of the benefits of RSGS membership is the option of free access to the SGJ in print (delivered to your door) and/or online (all volumes from 1885 to the present). We strongly encourage any member who currently does not have access to give the SGJ a try; just contact enquiries@ rsgs.org to request free access.

earthquakes

Scottish Geographical Journal

Acoustic-gravity waves are sound waves that can be generated by underwater earthquakes, explosions and landslides, which can all cause tsunamis. The new system uses hydraphone recordings and a ‘computational model’ to triangulate the source of the tectonic event, even thousands of kilometres away. Mr Kadri and Dr Bernabe Gomez Perez currently have 11 hydrophones in the sea around the world, and believe that with 24 they would be able to monitor the entire globe.

Professor Alison McCleery (1953–2023) Margaret Wilkes FRSGS I shared the Vice-Chair and Chair roles of the RSGS Edinburgh Group with Alison between 1999 and 2015 and was much saddened by her death in February.

She was an eloquent geographical exponent: one whose warm personality, robust intellect, energy and creative ideas were to the fore; whose chairing of Edinburgh meetings was crisp, business-like and leavened by her humour. Her oratorial skills were peerless, best demonstrated when the distinguished French geographer and Arctic explorer Professor Jean Malaurie (Mungo Park Medallist, 2006) visited Edinburgh in 2007 to speak to his film, The Last Kings of Thule. Alison magnificently set in motion the evening’s entente cordiale with a superbly-crafted introduction in fluent French to the delighted surprise of Professor Malaurie and guests present.

Similarly in 2013, when invited by OU Scotland to introduce our own Professor Iain Stewart as speaker in the National Gallery of Scotland, Alison did so with aplomb, providing an astute geographical thread through her control of questions and her memorable vote of thanks.

Alison contributed engrossing RSGS talks about distant island groups she’d visited to further her academic research and participated in RSGS Edinburgh local excursions. In all she did she was a deeply committed and very humane geographer.

Pyroclastic flows Pyroclastic flows from erupting volcanoes are well known for the immense destruction they cause and the dangers they pose to life, but the underlying driving force that allows them to travel at such high speeds over long distances was previously unknown.

Now, a team of researchers led by Dr Eric Breard of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Geosciences has identified a mechanism which causes the base layer of pyroclastic flows to exhibit fluid-like behaviour. “The discovery of the fragmentationinduced fluidisation process is hugely significant, as it enables us to develop more reliable numerical models that can accurately evaluate pyroclastic flow hazards around both current and potentially future active volcanoes,” said Dr Breard.

4 Summer 2023

news

Blog highlights

Our blog (rsgs.org/blog) covers a range of interesting topics and news about our awards and projects. Recent posts include:

Shackleton’s Ship Beneath the Ice

visit the blog at

rsgs.org/blog

Journey with purpose: Heart of Arabia Expedition: in 1917, St John Philby journeyed east to west across Arabia, from the Arabian Gulf to the Red Sea; 105 years later, the Heart of Arabia Expedition set out to follow in Philby’s footsteps.

Shackleton and the men on Elephant Island: in 1916, Ernest Shackleton’s beloved ship Endurance was crushed by ice and sank to the depths of the Weddell Sea, but what followed was an astonishing story of courage and survival.

AR6… or should that be AAAAAARRRRRR!?: Mike Robinson reflects on the latest IPCC report in this aptly named blog.

Frank Wild: the call of the ‘white unknown’: we mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Frank Wild, the Yorkshireman known as Shackleton’s right-hand man.

Geography in Scottish Education In February, RSGS convened a full-day, fast-paced conference at Dollar Academy, bringing together many key individuals and organisations from across the broad education sector to discuss how the subject of Geography can reach its full potential and continue to be a highly relevant subject for years to come. The meeting brought together policy experts and practitioners with academics, teachers and students, and covered a huge amount of ground.

Following the conference, we released a report outlining steps to maximise and promote the relevance and uptake of Geography in schools. The Geography in Scottish Education report (available at www. rsgs.org/schools-education) is now being shared throughout the education sector and with Scottish Government and its agencies. The report features provocations (being shared on our YouTube channel) given by 16 conference speakers, considering how to respond strategically, including Professors Ken Muir and Louise Hayward, authors of two crucial ongoing government reviews into education.

In late March, we were delighted to host the team behind the discovery of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s legendary lost ship Endurance for a sell-out event at Perth Concert Hall with nearly 1,200 people in attendance. Team members recounted their remarkable journey to locate and survey the ship 3,008 metres beneath the ice, which had not been seen since it sank in the Weddell Sea over 100 years ago. Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust Chair Donald Lamont, Expedition Leader Dr John Shears, Subsea Manager Nico Vincent, and Documentary Director Natalie Hewit each offered a unique perspective into the ground-breaking © Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust and Nick Birtwistle Endurance22 expedition which will be the feature of a documentary in 2024.

RSGS Chief Executive Mike Robinson said, “the state of the wreck is so perfect that it is as if the Endurance sank in 1915, and landed on the seabed in 2022.” Thanks to Taffrail and ship’s wheel, aft well deck. all who attended. © Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust

Local Group volunteers

help your local RSGS members and others who have attended our group Inspiring People talks over the years will know about the friendly welcome offered by our Local Group volunteers, who host and ensure the smooth running of the events. We could not run our programme of 90 face-to-face talks without them, and we are very grateful for their help and their time.

We are particularly grateful to these six amazing volunteers, who have now retired from their roles after many years of dedicated support to their Local Groups: David Langworth (Borders), Brian Blanchflower (Dunfermline), Frank Norris (Glasgow), Colin Shannon (Helensburgh), Robert Preece (Inverness), and Ann Stewart (Kirkcaldy). Thank you all!

New Local Group volunteers are always welcome. Please get in touch with us at enquiries@rsgs.org or 01738 455050 if you would like to get more involved with the Society.

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DEC Turkey-Syria Earthquake Appeal Huw Owen, External Relations Manager, Scotland, Disasters Emergency Committee

The huge earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria on 6th February weren’t necessarily a huge surprise in an area with an historic vulnerability to seismic shocks, but the scale of the devastation was an enormous shock, turning millions of lives upside down in an instant.

The intensity of the two quakes (7.8 and 7.5 on the Richter scale) that hit the region within hours of each other were made more devastating as the tectonic ruptures took place relatively near the Earth’s surface. Even worse, their epicentres were right next to a number of major cities and population centres, where millions of people were asleep and oblivious to the coming terror. It’s the worst disaster there in 200 years.

More than 50,000 people are known to have died. A similar number of buildings, many of them tower blocks, have been severely damaged or completely collapsed. The size of the area affected is also staggering. If it had happened here, it would have caused destruction and disruption across all of mainland Scotland.

That in itself should give us pause for thought. However, the devastation hit millions of people whose lives had already been threatened by more than a decade of civil war in Syria.

That includes millions of refugees in southern Turkey and even more internally displaced people trapped in appalling conditions in northwest Syria. Do you remember the news coverage of Aleppo or Idlib? Aid workers there describe families living for years in tents as the lucky ones – many now hosting families whose temporary homes or shelters folded during the quakes.

Amidst this trauma and misery, there has been a degree of fortune for many survivors, as a number of UK humanitarian charities have been supporting aid efforts in this region throughout the Syrian civil war, providing shelter, food and clean water and other support to the most vulnerable communities and individuals.

This crucial factor made it much easier for the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) to launch an urgent appeal for support from the UK public just three days after the earthquakes. The power and effectiveness of the DEC comes when 15 of the UK’s leading aid charities come together with the main UK broadcasters to collectively ask the public, governments and major companies to donate as much as they can to support an urgent, effective humanitarian response.

This formula, a unified call to action, always raises millions of pounds within days, which allows DEC members like the Red Cross, Oxfam and Save the Children to accelerate delivery of aid to those who need it most.

In the hours following the earthquakes, the initial response was led by emergency services and volunteers, such as the Turkish and Syrian Red Crescent, just like it would here when there are similar, fortunately much smaller, emergencies such as flooding or landslides.

As the scale of the initial devastation became clear, the response would have been quickly escalated through regional agencies to the Turkish government in Ankara. Shortly after that, a formal request was made for international assistance via the United Nations.

DEC charities work alongside the UN’s humanitarian

coordination body, OCHA, and as a result, the needs of affected populations can be rapidly assessed and appropriate support identified and coordinated. This is usually delivered through the local partners, who initially responded; the ones who know the geography along with the cultures, customs and needs of the most vulnerable families and communities who need the most help.

“DEC charities work alongside the UN’s humanitarian coordination body, OCHA.”

The response to the DEC appeal has been incredible; one of the biggest in our 60-year history with more than £140 million raised in just over two months. That will allow our members to continue to maintain temporary shelters for millions of people, along with key humanitarian supplies of food and water, along with health support to combat the risk of diseases such as cholera and measles. The scale of this support will also allow DEC charities to increase services such as trauma counselling, with the long-term psychological impacts of the earthquakes now described as a disaster within a disaster.

None of this would be possible without the compassion and solidarity of people and organisations across Scotland and the rest of the UK. Whilst the cost-of-living crisis continues to bite, more than £12 million has been raised here in Scotland for the Turkey Syria Appeal, more than £37 million for the DEC’s continuing response in Ukraine, along with millions more for the Pakistan floods and the ongoing hunger crisis in Afghanistan.

To everyone that has supported our work and those we hope will donate soon, we say a huge thank you.

Donations can be made on the DEC website, www.dec.org.uk.

6 Summer 2023

The 2023 Türkiye earthquake disaster Ekbal Hussain and Brian Baptie, The British Geological Survey

On 6th February 2023, two earthquakes with magnitudes of 7.8 and 7.6 struck the Kahramanmaraş region of southeastern Türkiye, resulting in over 57,000 fatalities (50,000 in Türkiye and 7,000 in Syria). The earthquakes occurred on the East Anatolian Fault, a nearly 600km long continental transform fault that separates the Arabian and Anatolian tectonic plates. These plates are moving horizontally relative to each other at a speed of around 10mm per year. But most of the fault is ‘stuck’, so this annual movement is stored on the locked fault as potential energy waiting to be released in an earthquake.

The Turkish disaster and emergency management authority (AFAD) had developed a seismic hazard estimate for the country based on historical activity along both the East Anatolian Fault and the North Anatolian Fault (Figure 1). The latter is also a major transform fault, similar in size to the San Andreas Fault, and forms the boundary between the Eurasian and the Anatolian tectonic plates, with Anatolia moving west relative to Eurasia at approximately 25mm per year. A sequence of large earthquakes over the last 100 years appears to be progressing from east to west along the North Anatolian Fault, raising concerns that the next event in the sequence may be close to Istanbul with a population of over 15 million people. Although the seismic hazard along the East Anatolian Fault is slightly lower than along the North Anatolian Fault, the red colours in Figure 1 show that even before the 2023 earthquakes, the Kahramanmaraş region was known to have a high seismic hazard potential. Large and damaging earthquakes have struck here in the past, with the city of Aleppo in northern Syria destroyed by several earthquakes in the last thousand years, including an earthquake in 1822 that caused over 20,000 fatalities.

buildings collapsed or heavily damaged in Türkiye and at least 11,000 in northern Syria. The earthquakes also caused significant damage to infrastructure such as roads and power supplies.

The initial mainshock earthquake struck a little after four o’clock in the morning, when most people were asleep in their homes and therefore most exposed to impacts of shaking and building damage. Additionally, those who escaped their homes were exposed to a winter storm and freezing temperatures of –5°C to –19°C. Heavy snow blocked roads and complicated search and rescue efforts, with some areas left without official aid for up to two days.

“Large and damaging earthquakes have struck here in the past.”

A World Bank Global Rapid Post-Disaster Damage Estimation (GRADE) report suggested that the earthquakes in Türkiye caused an estimated $34.2 billion in direct physical damages, the equivalent of 4% of the country’s 2021 GDP. In Syria the direct damage is estimated at $5.1 billion with recovery and reconstruction needs of $7.9 billion over three years.

The earthquakes also triggered an intense aftershock sequence, with several aftershocks large enough to cause moderate to severe ground shaking over a 600km region and causing further damage to buildings that had already been weakened. These aftershocks are expected to continue for months to come, and our current understanding of the statistics of the aftershock process suggests that there may be several tens of earthquakes with a magnitude of 6 or greater. Over a period of months to years, the frequency of the aftershocks will reduce, with earthquake activity gradually returning to previous levels.

The last time this part of the fault ruptured was in 1513. So, given the relative motion of the plates (10mm per year), about five metres of potential fault movement is estimated to have been accumulated on the fault over the past 500 years. The actual ground movement across the fault in the earthquakes was between four and six metres, which matches well with the estimated potential fault slip, indicating that most of the stored energy was released in the earthquakes.

In total nearly 500 kilometres of fault line moved in the two earthquakes. That is equivalent to a rupture running north-south along the entire length of England, from Southampton to the Scottish border near Carlisle, and with a displacement of four metres.

The earthquakes caused very severe shaking that lasted well over a minute, and the recorded ground accelerations at some sites close to the fault rupture exceeded 1.0g, meaning objects in these areas were briefly flung into the air. Figure 2 shows modelled peak ground acceleration for both earthquakes from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) ShakeMap app. A Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA) of 20% g corresponds roughly to Modified Mercalli Intensity VII, or very strong shaking. Widespread destruction occurred in a zone that stretched along the fault ruptures for each earthquake, with over 230,000

Evolution of the southern Turkey earthquake sequence along with mapped active faults (blue lines).

BGS © UKRI. Earthquake information: ANSS Comprehensive Earthquake Catalog (USGS ComCat).

Topography: Global Multi-resolution Terrain Elevation Data 2010 (GMTED2010). Mapped faults: GEM Global Active Faults Database.

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The February 2023 earthquakes occurred in a region that was known to have a high seismic hazard, yet the devastating impacts of these earthquakes show that the risk was not adequately considered. The focus therefore falls on understanding the conditioning factors that led to the disaster.

This is a topic government authorities and scientists will be increasingly concentrating on in the coming months.

The south-east region of Türkiye has experienced rapid urbanisation over the past few decades. This has led to a boom in residential construction activity with 52% of homes in the region built after 2001, when Türkiye updated its national building codes for earthquake resistant design following the magnitude 7.6 Izmit earthquake in 1999 that killed 17,000 people. However, many of these recently constructed buildings either completely collapsed or were severely damaged by the Kahramanmaraş earthquakes, suggesting that they were poorly built and not designed to withstand earthquakes.

Figure 1. Earthquake hazard map of Türkiye (Hussain et al, 2023). The 6th February 2023 earthquakes (blue lines) occurred on faults known to have high potential hazard (shown in red).

In Türkiye, over 13 million people (approximately 15% of the total population) were exposed to high to moderate ground shaking, with most of the damage occurring in the provinces of Hatay, Kahramanmaraş, Gaziantep, Malatya and Adıyaman.

According to the 2021 census, the region was amongst the most Figure 2. Estimated peak ground accelerations (PGA) from (a) the magnitude 7.8 Pazarcık earthquake, and (b) the magnitude 7.6 Elbistan earthquake, on 6th February 2023. The coloured contours show PGA values of 1, 2, 5, 10, 20% and impoverished in 50% g. Data from the USGS ShakeMap app.

Türkiye, with over 1.5 million living below the national poverty line, and The 2023 with generally higher fertility rates Kahramanmaraş and lower education achievements earthquakes compared to western Türkiye. In are a tragic northwest Syria, 8.8 million people reminder of lived in areas most affected by the how inadequate earthquakes, with 4.1 million people seismic already dependent on humanitarian preparedness can compound with social vulnerabilities assistance due to 12 years of and lead to devastating impacts. Mitigating earthquake conflict. risk requires not only understanding the hazard conditions people are exposed to, but also managing the social and Impoverished people are more built environments in which they live. The risk of future vulnerable to natural hazards. The tragedies can be reduced through strong governance and poor generally do not own property implementation of building codes, and by ensuring universal and are more likely to live in access to good quality homes. overcrowded conditions in houses

“Many of these recently constructed buildings either completely collapsed or were severely damaged.”

that are old or illegally built. These structures are more fragile and susceptible to collapse during an earthquake. In Syria the earthquakes worsened an existing humanitarian crisis.

8 Summer 2023

Economic impacts of the Türkiye–Syria earthquakes The World Bank

The World Bank Group works in every major area of development, providing a wide array of financial products and technical assistance, and helping countries share and apply innovative knowledge and solutions to the challenges they face. The text below is extracted from media releases that were published shortly after the devastating earthquakes that hit Türkiye and Syria in February.

Ankara, 27th February 2023 The two very large earthquakes of 6th February caused an estimated $34.2 billion in direct physical damages in Türkiye, the equivalent of 4% of the country’s 2021 GDP, according to a World Bank rapid damage assessment report released today. The report also acknowledges that recovery and reconstruction costs will be much larger, potentially twice as large, and that GDP losses associated to economic disruptions will also add to the cost of the earthquakes.

Continued aftershocks will also likely add to this damage estimate over time, says the report, which has been prepared to help inform the early response of the World Bank Group and its partners and to support government planning for recovery and reconstruction in Türkiye.

The 6th February earthquakes of 7.8 and 7.5 magnitude, followed by more than 7,500 aftershocks and two additional earthquakes, have resulted in the largest such disaster to hit the country in over 80 years, and have inflicted the heaviest damage in 11 provinces in southern Türkiye. These regions have some of the highest poverty rates in Türkiye and also host more than 1.7 million Syrian refugees, which is almost 50% of the total Syrian refugee population in Türkiye.

The Global Rapid Post-Disaster Damage Estimation (GRADE) report, which focuses on the direct physical damages in Türkiye, also estimates that 1.25 million people have been rendered temporarily homeless due to moderate to severe damage or complete building collapse. The report also highlights that 81% of the estimated damages occurred in Hatay, Kahramanmaraş, Gaziantep, Malatya and Adıyaman provinces, which are home to around 6.45 million people (around 7.4% of the total population of Türkiye).

Direct damages to residential buildings account for 53% ($18 billion) of the total damage, with 28% of damage ($9.7 billion) in non-residential buildings (eg, health facilities, schools, government buildings, and private sector buildings), and 19% of damage ($6.4 billion) related to infrastructure (eg, roads, power, water supply). The damage estimates in the report do not include the broader economic impacts and losses for the Turkish economy, or the cost of recovery and reconstruction which could be significantly more than the direct damages and requires a more in-depth assessment.

“Our hearts go out to the people of Türkiye and Syria for the great loss and suffering from this disaster,” said Anna Bjerde, World Bank Group Vice President for Europe and Central Asia. “It is heartening to see the mobilization of the global community to help in the massive relief and rescue effort.

The World Bank has immediately mobilized its technical expertise and financing to support Türkiye’s recovery efforts.”

On 9th February, the World Bank announced an initial package of $1.78 billion in assistance to help relief and recovery efforts. This comprises immediate assistance

of $780 million via Contingent Emergency Response Components (CERCs) from two existing projects in Türkiye and $1 billion in a new emergency recovery project to support people affected by this catastrophe.

“This disaster serves as a reminder of Türkiye’s high risk to earthquakes and of the need to enhance resilience in public and private infrastructure. As a leader in disaster risk management, the World Bank is committed to accompany Türkiye in its efforts to a disaster-resilient economic recovery,” said Humberto Lopez, World Bank Country Director for Türkiye.

Assessments are still ongoing, and given ongoing uncertainty and aftershocks, such as the magnitude 6.3 earthquake on 20th February 2023 in Hatay province, damage estimates may increase further.

Washington, 18th March 2023 Syria’s real GDP is expected to contract by 5.5% in 2023 following the 6th February and 20th February earthquakes that hit the northern and western parts of the country, according to a new World Bank damage assessment released today.

Economic growth may contract further if reconstruction progress is slower than expected, given limited public resources, weak private investment, and limited humanitarian assistance reaching the affected areas.

“These regions have some of the highest poverty rates in Türkiye.”

The Syria Earthquake 2023 Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (RDNA) presents an assessment of the impact of the earthquake on physical assets, infrastructure, and service delivery in the six most affected governorates. It provides a preliminary estimate of infrastructure reconstruction and service delivery restoration needs in the immediate and short term, based on publicly available information, remote data sources and sensing techniques. The RDNA also analyses the macroeconomic and socioeconomic impacts of the earthquake to understand anticipated repercussions on the economic outlook and on the well-being of the Syrian people.

According to the Syria Earthquake 2023 RDNA, physical damages caused by the earthquake are estimated at US$3.7 billion, while losses are estimated at US$1.5 billion, bringing the total estimated impact to US$5.2 billion. Losses account for reduced output in productive sectors, lost revenue, and higher operating costs in the provision of services. Housing is the most severely affected sector (24% of total damages), followed by transport, environment (the associated cost of clearing the rubble) and agriculture. In terms of losses, the agriculture sector incurred the heaviest toll with the gap in access to food estimated at US$1.3 billion (83% of total losses). The governorate of Aleppo suffered the greatest damages (44% of total damages, predominantly in housing then agriculture), followed by Idlib (21%). The city of Aleppo also topped the list of mostly affected cities with almost 60% of total damages, followed by Latakia (12%) and Azaz (10%).

Syria’s real GDP contraction is projected to widen by 2.3% in 2023 because of the earthquake, on top of an earlier projected contraction of 3.2% in 2023 (Syria Economic Monitor, Winter 2022/2023). The additional contraction is

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primarily driven by the destruction of physical capital and disruptions in trade activity. Inflation is expected to increase substantially, primarily driven by the reduction in goods available, an increase in transport costs, and a rise in overall demand for reconstruction material.

Twelve years of conflict have raised the population’s vulnerability to crises and natural disasters. The earthquake has led to a significant deterioration in humanitarian conditions, particularly at the level of food security and housing precariousness. Vulnerable segments of the population, such as women, children, the elderly, and those with disabilities, as well as the poor, were hit hardest.

Earthquake affected areas were further home to almost three million internally displaced people (IDPs) or 50% of Syria’s total IDP population who were already facing severe welfare challenges.

“The recent earthquake exacerbates the already dire consequences of the 12-year-long conflict for the people of Syria,” said Jean-Christophe Carret, World Bank Country Director for the Middle East Department. “The World Bank

hopes that this rapid damage and needs assessment will help inform key players on the needs associated with this devastating disaster and contribute to encourage international response efforts.”

The RDNA estimates recovery and reconstruction needs across the six assessed governorates at US$7.9 billion, with needs in the first year following the earthquake estimated at US$3.7 billion and at US$4.2 billion in the two consecutive years. The agriculture sector registered the largest needs (27% of total needs), followed by housing (18%), social protection (16%) and transport (12%).

In the early recovery period (up to one-year post-earthquake), response efforts should prioritize the most urgent needs of affected communities, including emergency shelter, food, water, and health services. In parallel and over the two following years, efforts should gradually shift towards rebuilding damaged infrastructure and restoring essential services, as well as supporting affected communities to rebuild their livelihoods and promote sustainable development.

“Twelve years of conflict have raised the population’s vulnerability to crises and natural disasters.”

İskenderun, Hatay, Türkiye, February 2023. © Çağlar Oskay from Unsplash.

The World Bank in Türkiye…

…and in Syria

The World Bank’s deep and productive partnership with Türkiye dates back to 1950. In recent years, the Bank has become a leading partner in supporting a green transition to help Türkiye protect its people against the impacts of climate change as well as disaster risk management, urban development, and energy efficiency.

Following the onset of the conflict, all operational activity and missions to Syria were halted. However, the World Bank monitors the economic and social impact of the conflict on the Syrian people to help inform international thinking on Syria and build preparedness for recovery efforts, if and when they take place.

10 Summer 2023

From the rubble comes hope Claire Cook, Senior Media and Marketing Officer, Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund (SCIAF)

The early morning of 6th February 2023 began like no other for large swathes of southern Türkiye and northern Syria. Two immense earthquakes measuring 7.7 and 7.8, unparalleled in strength in the region since 1939, unleashed their devastation upon the sleeping populations.

The quakes were another devastating blow for war-torn Syria, heaping misery upon misery after years of civil war. Even before the earthquake, the UN estimated that 15 million people in Syria were living in need.

Immediate aftermath The tragedy killed more than 50,000 people and injured 100,000. Thousands of homes, schools, hospitals and other vital infrastructure were also destroyed, in part because they were not designed to factor in earthquake vulnerabilities and contractors were not necessarily following building standards.

Syria, and have been since 2016, helping people rebuild their lives after the conflict there.”

Building back better

After our first-wave response, reestablishing livelihoods after the cameras have moved on to the next crisis, and ideally ‘building back better’, is the next stage. But funding opportunities for such discrete longer-term activities can be harder to come by.

However, thanks to generous donations and support from the people of Scotland, we will be able to continue our work as the emergency transitions into longer-term support.

In the coming months and years, projects in the region will likely include repairing roads, schools and hospitals so that they can better cope with future earthquakes, and providing the skills and education that people need to work themselves out of poverty.

Based on what the communities tell us they need most, this could be setting up livelihood programmes in rural areas to help families farm again, or providing smallscale grants so businesses can be re-established.

Such high levels of destruction would have stretched even the bestresourced responses in the first 72 hours after the quake. And exacerbating these challenges further were the multiple armed factions operating in the region, which slowed down the movement of emergency relief supplies.

The net effect was that a patchwork response materialised, with many of the more vulnerable communities being overlooked and bypassed.

Fortunately, this is why SCIAF works in the way it does. Our model of collaborating with local partners, and focusing on those most in need, ensures that we make the biggest impact with the funds available.

The Caritas network In a matter of hours, our sister agencies based in the affected communities, Caritas Türkiye and Caritas Syria, began delivering life-saving materials including shelter, clean water, sanitation, medicine and food. Refuge was offered in safe locations such as church facilities.

“This is where the beauty of being part of the Caritas confederation, the second largest humanitarian network in the world, comes to the fore,” said SCIAF Programme Manager Mark Adams.

“Caritas, literally meaning charity, operates in 160 countries across the globe. And what a strength that is. It means that, without hesitation, we are able to reach out to the Caritas of a particular country within hours of an emergency and pledge our love and support. In February, that’s exactly what happened in Türkiye and Syria. We were already working in

“Caritas Türkiye and Caritas Syria began delivering life-saving materials.”

Samar’s story Samar, an 82-year-old widow, fled Syria after the earthquake and arrived shortly after in Şalinurfa, over the border in Türkiye. Then, just a few weeks later in March, disaster struck for the second time with heavy rains flooding Şalinurfa, bringing waves of fastmoving, brown water crashing through the streets.

After this second disaster, Caritas found Samar amongst the rubble. She was living in a makeshift tent

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made of nylon and cardboard, and urgently needed her medication. She had nothing and was suffering from shock and confusion.

Caritas first took her to a private hospital so she could receive the care she needed, and then began working to secure her other critical needs, such as a safe place to sleep and emergency supplies. “I don’t understand who would help someone like me,” Samar told our Partners.

“The earth is shaking, and water is flooding the city – you have the freedom to keep warm in a safe city, yet you come here to help someone like me!”

From the rubble, SCIAF and the Caritas network are bringing hope. To find out more, and donate to SCIAF’s Syria-Türkiye appeal, visit sciaf.org.uk/emergencies.

Pictures courtesy of SCIAF via Caritas Internationalis.

12 Summer 2023

Geography and seismic hazard Roger M W Musson, retired seismologist

In the spring of 1974 I was a third-year Geography undergraduate at Queen’s University Belfast. One afternoon we had a practical class in which we were introduced to Monte Carlo simulation as a tool in the quantitative geographer’s armoury. I found the topic rather interesting, perhaps due to the fact I had been for many years an enthusiast for board games, in which matters were often resolved by dice rolls. In 1974 computers were hardly thought of, so any Monte Carlo exercise had to be carried out with actual dice. Little did I think at the time how my career was to be shaped by that afternoon’s class.

distance; again, this will be simulated by polling random numbers.

What one then has is a simulation of what could happen in the way of earthquake ground motions at the site in the course of a year. Obviously, this is very far from a prediction, and what will actually happen is probably totally different.

But when one repeats the exercise, say, ten million times, the aggregated results depict pretty much every possible outcome. To turn this into probabilities is a simple matter of counting the number of times a given ground motion is exceeded. One can do this analytically, and indeed, this has been common practice since the late 1970s. The results from the analytic approach and the Monte Carlo approach are identical, given the same input. But one of the advantages of the Monte Carlo method is that it is much easier for the non-specialist to understand the results. Conventional analytic programs for computing probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) tend to be a bit of a black box. It is more relatable if one can say to the client, “We have simulated what your plant might experience from earthquakes over its operating lifetime, and these figures show what we found.”

“It has proved impossible to predict earthquakes in any sort of useful way.”

About 20 years later, as a seismologist working for the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, I was at a meeting in which seismic hazard was being discussed, when I had a flashback to that practical class, and realised that here was an ideal subject for Monte Carlo simulation.

At one time it was thought that earthquake prediction would be the panacea against earthquakes, but it has proved impossible to predict earthquakes in any sort of useful way. Consequently, the main line of defence of society against earthquakes has been safer earthquake resistant construction. But engineers need to know quantitively what the hazard is. In theory, a strong earthquake can happen virtually anywhere, but in some places the probability is vanishingly small. For routine buildings, it is often considered that a 10% chance in 50 years is an adequate safety margin. For sensitive structures – dams and power plants for instance – a one in 10,000 chance per year is often used.

The seismologist needs to calculate the ground shaking corresponding to those probabilities.

I wrote my own software to implement PSHA the Monte Carlo way, and have been using it now for nearly 30 years, and would find it hard to go back to using any other program for the task. Also, the Monte Carlo method is now finding favour elsewhere in the world. So the course of seismology has changed thanks to that practical class so long ago!

The first thing needed is the spatiotemporal distribution of earthquakes around the site; usually within 100km is enough, sometimes 300km. At the words ‘spatial distribution’ the eyes of any geographer will light up. Not for nothing did the great French seismologist Fernand Montessus de Ballore (1851–1923) entitle his magnum opus of 1906 La Géographie Séismologique. This was based on his legendary catalogue of world earthquakes, said to occupy 40m of shelf in manuscript. It was lost around 1940, but rediscovered in the 1980s, and I was privileged to be the second seismologist to examine it.

Having modelled the spatiotemporal distribution of the regional earthquakes, it is straightforward to produce a catalogue of simulated earthquakes using Monte Carlo, making the assumption that seismicity follows a Poissonian distribution, an assumption usually found justified (when one excludes aftershocks). Given a probability of an earthquake occurring, a random number is drawn to determine if an event occurs or not, and similarly, the epicentre and magnitude are obtained randomly within the parameters of the model. For each event, one then produces a value for the ground motion observed at the site, using an equation that estimates ground motion as a function of magnitude and

The spatiotemporal distribution of earthquakes in Scotland. The inset graph shows the annual probability of earthquakes of different magnitudes.

Roger Musson is the author of The Million Death Quake: The Science of Predicting Earth’s Deadliest Natural Disaster, published in 2012.

Monte Carlo simulation is a mathematical technique which is used to estimate the possible outcomes of an uncertain event.

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Measuring magnitude Professor Iain Stewart FRSGS, Royal Scientific Society, Jordan; Mike Robinson, RSGS Chief Executive

Earthquakes are the constant hum of our dynamic planet, controlled by the motion of the Earth’s tectonic plates, driven by heat generation from the decay of radioactive elements deep inside our planet. Most of the hundreds of tremors that are recorded by sensitive monitoring equipment every day go entirely unnoticed by us going about our daily lives. They are just too small to be ‘felt’, or simply too remote, such as those occurring deep on the ocean seabed. But the ones that we remember are those few that are big enough to wreak havoc on people and places.

But what is ‘big enough’? There are several different ways to think about earthquake size. Probably the most familiar is the ‘Richter magnitude’, which is a physical measure of the amplitude of the seismic waves recorded on a local seismometer. The Richter (or local) magnitude scale (ML) ranges from 0 to 10 and is logarithmic, meaning that a magnitude 7 earthquake is ten times stronger than a magnitude 6 earthquake, and around a hundred times stronger than a magnitude 5 earthquake. The trouble with the Richter scale, however, is that above magnitude 8 it blurs out (‘saturates’) and so fails to accurately capture the size of the very biggest quakes.

For that reason, we instead prefer to measure the total energy generated by an earthquake: its ‘seismic moment’. This ‘moment magnitude’ (M or MW) is also scaled in increments from 0 to 10, with each whole number representing an increase of 32 times the amount of energy released. So, a magnitude 7 earthquake releases 32 times more energy than a magnitude 6 earthquake, but over 1,000 (32 x 32) times more energy than a magnitude 5 earthquake. Indeed, for each increase of 0.1 in moment magnitude, the energy release increases by 1.5 times, meaning that whether an earthquake is a magnitude 7.0 or a 7.1 might seem like seismological hair-splitting to some, but it may represent a life or death difference for those on the receiving end.

What earthquake magnitude doesn’t tell us much about is how all that seismic energy actually affects people or places.

Around one in ten of all earthquakes are of magnitude 5 or greater, and only around 20 of these annually are of a magnitude of 7 or greater. But when a more powerful earthquake hits areas with high populations, especially those with poor infrastructure, it can be a recipe for disaster.

To measure the physical effects of seismic energy release we shift attention to earthquake ‘intensity’, which determines the degree of seismic shaking at a given place and broadly decreases with distance from the earthquake epicentre, and depth of the hypocentre directly below the ground-level epicentre. In the United States and many other parts of the world, this has long been described by the Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) scale, but in the 1990s, seismologists in Europe developed the European Macroseismic Scale (EMS).

Whilst the MMI is a subjective scale based on inferences about the observed effects on people, structures and environment, the EMS also incorporates geological data and measurements of ground motion. Both these scales range from I (Not felt) to XII (Extreme (MMI) or Completely devastating (EMS)). Because the scales measure slightly different things, they are difficult to compare, but each is instructive in its own way.

Much of our knowledge about earthquake impacts comes from our observations of their past incidence. In that sense earthquakes are rarely ‘bolts from the blue’. There is a persistent and consistent geography to their lethal occurrence. Long before the 1960s when the pattern of global seismicity first revealed the edges of our planet’s moving tectonic plates, the main earthquake belts were well known.

Along the western edge of the Americas and its continuation around the Pacific’s volcanic ‘Ring of Fire’, across Southeast Asia and along the foothills of the Alpine-Himalayan mountain chain, and slicing down the Great Rift from Turkey through the Middle East and deep into East Africa; this is earthquake country.

“There are several different ways to think about earthquake size.”

Here, over millennia, human cultures have co-evolved with seismicity. Many ancient societies developed ways of countering this endemic threat in the manner that they built or the materials they used, and settlements were smaller and more loosely scattered. But with the rapid industrialisation and economic growth of the late 20th century, more and more people have crowded into urban sprawls dominated by concrete, steel and glass. Nature’s tectonic fault lines are now within striking distance of many of the planet’s most populous cities, raising the spectre of seismic death tolls that are far in excess of anything witnessed previously in human history. We know where these human targets are and, thanks to geological science, we broadly know the likely culpable seismic fault lines, so the critical challenge becomes how best to prepare both people and places. Nations with advanced economies can now engineer against all but the very largest of earthquake dangers, but much of the chronic seismic threat lurks in some of the poorest quarters of the planet, where wealth, health and infrastructure are at a minimum. Earthquakes might routinely emerge from Nature, but the disasters that repeatedly arise from them are made in Society.

The ten deadliest earthquakes of this century Event 2004 Indian Ocean (Indonesia) earthquake and tsunami 2010 Haiti earthquake 2008 Sichuan (China) earthquake 2005 Kashmir (Pakistan) earthquake 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquakes 2003 Bam (Iran) earthquake 2001 Gujarat (India) earthquake 2011 Tōhoku (Japan) earthquake and tsunami 2015 Nepal earthquake 2006 Yogyakarta (Indonesia) earthquake

Magnitude (MW)

Intensity (MMI)

Depth (km)

Fatalities

9.1–9.3

IX

30.0

227,898

7.0

X

13.0

160,000

7.9

XI

19.0

87,587

7.6

XI

15.0

87,351

7.8

XII

17.9 10.0

59,259

6.6

IX

10.0

34,000

7.7

X

16.0

20,085

9.0–9.1

IX

29.0

19,759

7.8

X

8.2

8,964

6.4

IX

10.0

5,782

14 Summer 2023

The earthquake might upend more than Turkey’s elections Yaprak Gürsoy, Professor of European Politics and Chair of Contemporary Turkish Studies, European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science The impact of the two destructive earthquakes that hit southeast Turkey and northern Syria on 6th February will exceed the number of lives lost – the death toll now [31st March] stands at more than 50,000 – and the tens of billions of dollars’ worth of damage caused.

In Turkey, the area affected housed more than 15 million people, roughly 18% of the country’s population, of whom 2.7 million are now homeless. Millions more in Turkey and beyond became witnesses to this tragedy through their relatives and friends. The knowledge that much of the rest of the country lies on earthquake fault lines has led to fear, anger and despair. The natural disaster represents a collective trauma and will clearly have an impact on voters as the country prepares for a general election on 14th May. Trauma as revelation “What we call trauma takes place when the very powers that we are convinced will protect us and give us security become our tormentors,” writes Jenny Edkins in her book Trauma and the Memory of Politics. In that sense, large-scale traumatic events “are overwhelming but they are also a revelation,” compelling communities to reconsider the political and social order that gave meaning to their lives.

before the earthquake, was accelerated by Greek relief efforts; these were reciprocated after the Athens quake a month later. Once in power, the AKP government renewed Turkey’s commitment to the European Union agenda following the December 1999 Helsinki Summit which gave Turkey candidate status thanks to Greece lifting its veto.

The May elections Which way will Turkey vote if the elections on 14th May go ahead as planned?

So far, the Erdoğan government is attempting to control the narrative. The earthquake is fate, and the cities will be rebuilt in a year through a reconstruction drive, says the president – a policy inspired by the AKP’s previous model of spurring economic growth. Erdoğan has added that anyone who goes against the official account of the state’s response to the devastation is “immoral, dishonest and vile.”

While this might galvanize anger among opposition voters, it may garner support from those who believe Erdoğan’s stance of strong leadership can restore their lives to prequake normality. Even without the government’s encouragement, some voters are falling back on familiar enemies such as the Syrian refugees or foreign powers, for making the situation worse.

They stand accused of carving out benefits for themselves in the chaos, or even causing the earthquakes.

“People affected were let down by institutions supposed to protect them.”

After the devastation caused by this natural disaster, people affected were let down by institutions supposed to protect them. Thousands of buildings collapsed and buried people. Rescue teams were slow to respond and poorly equipped.

The sense of betrayal was compounded when the focus fell on a 2018 government amnesty that gave legal status to at least 7.4 million sub-standard buildings. New buildings that should have met earthquake regulations turned to dust due to the poor implementation of existing codes.

The political consequences of collective trauma can still be felt decades later – as seen in the recent 20th anniversary of the Iraq War. Although caused by violent terrorist attacks, the assaults on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in September 2001 were nevertheless comparably traumatic for the United States. Within days, the Bush administration labelled its response a ‘War on Terror’.

The focus on security in domestic and foreign policy contributed to the invasion of Iraq, to the re-election of President George W Bush in 2004, and Republican control of Congress until 2007. The attack on the Twin Towers demonstrates how governments can take control and turn people’s reactions into preconceived notions of victims and enemies. In this way, feelings of security can be reestablished.

By contrast, Turkey’s earthquake of August 1999 eventually led to profound change. That quake, which caused more than 17,000 deaths, provoked a similar sense of betrayal by the political system. Widespread corruption led to buildings crumbling and chaotic rescue efforts. The governing coalition was penalized by the voters and booted out three years later, allowing Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP party to rise to power.

There were also sweeping changes in foreign policy. A rapprochement between Greece and Turkey, that had started

Early polls indicate the election will be a close call. Survivors struggling with registration may lower turnout.

Kemal Kılıç daroğlu, the opposition presidential candidate, is just ahead of Erdoğan in the polls at the time of writing. His campaign depends on the mutual support of the six parties National Alliance and the backing of others, including the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party.

No matter who wins, the new government will face enormous challenges. The World Bank estimates quake damage to be nearly $35 billion, 4% of Turkey’s GDP. It will require at least twice as much to rebuild the cities, it says. Internal displacement, housing crises elsewhere, disruption to education and the closure of local businesses will all affect the economy. This is compounded by high levels of inflation, which peaked at 85.5% in October 2022.

If Erdoğan wins the presidential elections with a majority in parliament, the government will face the financial burden of recovery but is likely to continue with its main domestic and foreign policy goals, albeit with concessions.

Thawing relations International humanitarian missions seem to have thawed frosty relations with Greece, Egypt and others. The European Investment Bank has reversed its lending ban to provide €500 million as part of a €7 billion EU and international package to Turkey and Syria. The United States committed $185 million in February.

It is too soon to say whether these developments will lead to further changes, such as Turkey moving to ratify Sweden’s accession to NATO. While Turkey will continue to need international financial help, the West is not the only source, with aid from the Gulf states amounting to $370 million

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in the first two weeks. A long-term restoration of relations with the West would only occur if Turkey’s relations with Russia and policies in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean changed.

Should the National Alliance opposition win, it will also have the task of returning the AKP’s presidential system to parliamentarianism. On foreign policy, the National Alliance has been mostly silent – a possible sign that their focus will be on domestic politics. However, the six parties seem to have agreed on renewing EU membership goals and committing to a western orientation while not alienating Russia.

A change of government and improved attitudes towards Turkey in foreign capitals make it likely these policy goals will fall into place. The restructuring of internal affairs could lead to a less assertive foreign policy, for example, in the Middle East. After the Arab Spring, the AKP government adopted strong stances even in countries that don’t border Turkey, such as Egypt and Libya.

İskenderun, Hatay, Türkiye, February 2023. © Çağlar Oskay from Unsplash.

Turkey faces a huge rebuilding task following the quakes. Given those challenges, the outcome of the elections might only be the prelude to an impending transformation. It will take years to know if Turkey will bury the memory of the earthquake with the rubble or use it to rebuild its politics along with its cities.

“The political consequences of collective trauma can still be felt decades later.”

© Faruk-Tokluoğlu from Pexels.

This article was originally published on 31st March 2023 in The World Today, the international affairs magazine from Chatham House (www.chathamhouse.org/publications/ the-world-today/2023-04/earthquake-might-upend-more-turkeyselections). © Aboodi Vesakaran from Unsplash.

16 Summer 2023

The Levant’s lethal seismic threat Professor Iain Stewart FRSGS, Royal Scientific Society, Jordan; Dr Jamal Dabbeek, Al Najah National University, Nablus, Palestine; Karim Aljawhari, University School for Advanced Studies (IUSS) Pavia, Italy In AD 1170, whilst the Christian armies of the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem were locked in an ongoing struggle with the Muslim forces of the Sultanate of Syria, the medieval chronicler William of Tyre reported that the Holy Lands had been struck by a “great and terrible earthquake, far more violent than any other within the memory of men now living.”

Contemporary accounts by Arab scholars conveyed the unprecedented scale of the destruction. “Half of Aleppo collapsed and it was said that eighty thousand people were killed,” said Ibn al-Jawzi. “As for the Frankish territory, the earthquake tremors also had the same effect there. They were kept busy repairing their towns, fearful of Nur Al-Din. Each side was occupied with repair work for fear of the other,” said Ibn al-Athir.

Many tens of thousands may have died in the calamity but it was the damage of vital fortifications that most vexed Baldwin III, ruler of the kingdom of Jerusalem, and his opposing foe, Sultan Nur Al-Din. Citadels, fortresses, towers and city walls had fallen equally in both the northern Muslim region (modern Syria) and the southern Crusader region (roughly equivalent to the modern state of Israel and the Palestinian Authority and Jordan’s Dead Sea coastal strip). In some towns along the frontier, the horrendous scale of the ruinous jolt and its aftershocks drove the citizens away, leaving many settlements abandoned. For two armies whose resources had been all but exhausted by expensive and distant military campaigns, the mutual seismic destruction across the frontline forced a temporary standstill to the conflict. Each side was worried that their enemy might take advantage of the situation and launch a surprise attack, and so a formal peace treaty was quickly brokered.

turbulence, lethal earthquakes lurk. The AD 1157 earthquake was ‘large’ (probably magnitude 7.0–7.8) and the AD 1170 event was possibly ‘great’ (magnitude 8.0). Both occurred along a persistent corridor of recurring seismic shaking that slices north-south from southern Turkey and Syria, carving through the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea to connect through the Gulf of Aqaba with the Red Sea beyond. This is the axis of a major wrench in the Earth’s crust that was first identified in the late 1940s by the British geologist, Albert Quennell. A decade before the theory of plate tectonics began to emerge from geophysical exploration of the oceans, in the desert lands of Transjordan Bert Quennell was carefully mapping over 100 kilometres of sideways movement across a tectonic fault line that today we understand separates two northward drifting continental masses, the sluggish African plate and the speedier Arabian plate. In modern geology speak, it is a ‘transform’ or ‘conservative’ plate boundary, where differential horizontal motion of around 5mm per year is accommodated by episodic ‘stick-slip’ rupture of the intervening fault line. Geological excavations across surface traces of the Dead Sea Transform reveal that some fault sections have endured many centuries of gradual tectonic strain without rupture, meaning that enormous pent-up seismic energy is waiting to be released.

“Natural calamities are political opportunities.”

Those worries were well founded. Just over a decade previously, in the late summer of AD 1157, a large earthquake in the north had levelled the Muslim lands, though the scale of destruction was significantly lower further south in the Crusader principalities.

Recognising the state of ruin across the Syrian Sultanate, Baldwin rapidly assembled his Christian forces and invaded, laying siege to Muslim outposts. In the end, internal disputes amongst the Crusader commanders resulted in the hasty military campaign being abandoned, and their forces returned empty-handed to their southern heartland. But the short-lived incursion is a telling reminder that natural calamities are political opportunities, whether that be to amplify endemic cross-border tensions or, as in the case of AD 1170, to de-escalate them (although once damaged defences had been fortified, normal hostilities were swiftly resumed).

Viewed almost a thousand years later, these medieval disasters shine a historical spotlight on an otherwise hidden geological threat. From the religious chronicles of the Holy Lands and the archaeological excavations of disrupted ancient cultural sites, the Levant region has long been recognised as earthquake country. Underneath a surface of enduring political and religious

Yet, in contrast to its rich historical record of violent earthquakes, recent times have been remarkably quiet here.

In the heart of the Levant, in the Jordan Valley, the most destructive earthquake of the 20th century was a fairly moderate-sized affair. On 11th July 1927, a magnitude 6.2 earthquake nucleated in the northern part of the Dead Sea, radiating strong seismic shaking across a landscape whose geopolitical make-up was still taking shape. Over a broad swathe of what is now Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and Jordan, up to 500 people died. The worst death toll was in the Palestinian city of Nablus, where a large

The Palestine earthquake of 11th July 1927: a blocked-up street in Nablus, choked by fallen houses which entombed many inhabitants. Source: Matson (G Eric and Edith) Photograph Collection, Prints & Photographs Division, US Library of Congress.

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part of the historical centre was completely destroyed.

Widespread landslides and rockfalls occurred, with slumping and localised flooding along the Jordan river and a one-metre high seiche wave was generated in the Dead Sea. East of the river, in the Emirate of Transjordan, 80 people were killed in the city of Salt, with another 20 fatalities across the country, including the new capital Amman.

Back then, Amman was a small but fast-growing town (its oldest stone building dates to 1923) but it has now swollen into a city of over four million people, many of them occupying a hastily constructed building stock that has not been tested by a moderate (M>6) seismic event. The capital city and its A view of downtown Amman. About 90% of Amman’s building stock are low-rise buildings, which are still excluded from Jordan’s northern neighbours Zarqa and seismic design requirements. © Iain Stewart Irbid are located within 30km of the Dead Sea Transform, meaning that over 80% of Jordan’s has grown into a modern city of more than 200,000 people. population are exposed to ‘moderate’ or ‘high’ seismic hazard Situated between two mountains, its urban corridor of poor (a level of shaking masonry structures stretches east-west along a valley of soft capable of causing sedimentary soils. It is a deadly combination that greatly significant damage amplified its seismic destruction a century ago, yet, today, to vulnerable or very most structures still do not comply with seismic provisions. vulnerable structures); Adding to its vulnerability, Nablus has four refugee camps 13% of its residents packed with informal structures. By 2050, this formal and are exposed to ‘very informal building stock will double, and so will the seismic high’ seismic shaking hazard (capable of causing significant risk. damage to engineered structures). Modern seismic design Which is why the University of Edinburgh-led urban disaster has been introduced only very recently, and low-rise buildings, risk hub, Tomorrow’s Cities, has added Nablus to its global which make up about 90% of the building stock, are still consortium of cities that is pioneering a new integrated excluded from those stringent design requirements. approach to risk-informed urban planning. It is an approach

“Underneath a surface of enduring political and religious turbulence, lethal earthquakes lurk.”

It is a similar story in nearby Jerusalem and Damascus.

Most of the region’s largest urban centres remain untested against and unprepared for the Levant’s latent earthquake threat. In this territorial tinderbox, even a repeat of even a fairly modest earthquake, similar in size to that of 1927, could have significant economic, social and political implications. The recurrence of a M>7 earthquake could be regionally destabilizing, just as it was back in the 12th century. Today, the region’s political fragmentation confounds collective scientific efforts to confront the seismic implications of its deeper geological fragmentation. The devastating 2023 earthquake in northern Syria, which activated the northernmost tip of the Dead Sea Transform, may turn out to be the seismic shock that motivates an integrated transboundary approach to the Levant’s seismic unpreparedness.

in which local communities and stakeholders are engaged as partners in future visioning of long-term urban development under contrasting hazard scenarios. It is part of a wider people-centred approach in disaster risk science that acknowledges that while earthquakes are natural hazards, the disasters they cause are ‘un-natural’ calamities constructed by society.

In the meantime, current efforts focus on specific urban centres where the disaster risk is most acute. One of the most seismically vulnerable is Nablus, the Palestinian city that was severely ruined in 1927. A century on, the old town

Raphael K (2010) The impact of the 1157 and 1170 Syrian earthquakes on Crusader–Muslim politics and military affairs (in Ancient Earthquakes. Geological Society of America Special Paper, Vol 471)

FURTHER READING

Dabbeek J, Silva V (2020) Modeling the residential building stock in the Middle East for multi-hazard risk assessment (Natural Hazards, Vol 100)

Professor Jo Sharp at St Andrews beach.

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From emergency response to risk preparedness Dr Sérgio Esperancinha, Professor John McCloskey, Professor Mark Pelling, Professor Iain Stewart, Tomorrow’s Cities

In a 2002 research paper published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, one could read in the Discussion section what today seems like a gloomy prediction: “our modelling unambiguously identifies two regions of the East Anatolian Fault Zone (EAFZ) which have been significantly loaded in the past 200 years or so and which might produce the next large earthquake in the area.”

In the conclusions, the authors were more categorical: “the stress modelling presented in this paper clearly indicates a build-up of stress in the Kahramanmaraş-Malatya (KM) region of the EAFZ” which, together with the historical record of large earthquakes associated with that same fault section “force us to conclude that: firstly, the KM region is the most likely location of the next damaging earthquake on the EAFZ and, secondly, it is likely to produce a very large (M7.3) event.”

“Actions to reduce disaster risk can be implemented.”

On 6th February, a couple of hours before dawn and when most people were still sleeping in their beds, a M7.8 earthquake struck south of the city of Kahramanmaraş, in southern Turkey. The first reports seemed clear; it had been the KM region of the EAFZ identified more than 20 years before that had ruptured and produced that large shock.

Nine hours later, a second M7.5 event, the largest aftershock, occurred near Elbistan, 95 kilometres northeast of the first earthquake. Over the next two weeks, six earthquakes of magnitude greater than 6 rattled southern Turkey and northern Syria. When dust settled, more than 160,000 buildings had collapsed or were severely damaged and the death toll surpassed 53,000 victims. Had the authors of the 2002 paper predicted the earthquake 20 years earlier? No; predicting an earthquake requires pinpointing its location, time and magnitude and will probably remain impossible.

But they forecast it and identified an area of particularly high short-term seismic hazard, and that’s crucial as it shows that, with current scientific knowledge, actions to reduce disaster risk can be implemented.

Can disasters be avoided?

Apart from the infamous ‘Pacific Ring of Fire’, Turkey is in one of the most seismically active regions in the world.

In this area, three tectonic plates – the African, Anatolian, and Arabian plates – converge and interact, while a fourth plate – the Eurasian plate – constrains their movement in relation to each other. The northward motion of the Arabian plate in relation to Africa is accommodated by the Dead Sea Transform (DST), a major fault zone with left-lateral strike-slip motion. However, this movement also pushes the Anatolian plate, which is unable to move due to the presence of the Eurasian plate, resulting in compression being accommodated through a left-lateral strike-slip fault known as the East Anatolian Fault (EAF), and a right-lateral strike-slip fault known as the North Anatolian Fault (NAF). As a result, the Anatolian plate is extruded westward. Given this complex tectonic

Quito and Pichincha volcano, Ecuador. © DEZALB from Pixabay.

setting, it is not surprising that the region has experienced numerous earthquakes over the years due to stress accumulation and release, primarily along the EAF and NAF. “The incident of 6th February was a tragedy, but not a surprise. It proved in the most tragic way that the methods behind the 2002 forecast allow us to point out areas of high risk, but also the urgent need of global action to reduce risk in areas of such remarkable hazard,” said Professor John McCloskey, Chair in Natural Hazards Science at the University of Edinburgh, Tomorrow’s Cities Co-Director, and one of the authors of the 2002 paper.

Whilst still a long way from being able to accurately predict earthquakes, advancements in the understanding of earthquake physics since the publication of the research paper have allowed for the identification of individual faults with high stress levels, indicating a higher probability of failure. Satellite radar measurements of the deformation of the Earth’s crust also enable the identification of regions that are likely to experience large earthquakes in the future.

Similar progress has been made in other scientific fields.

Meteorology, supported by vast amounts of data from weather stations and advanced numerical modelling, can forecast the intensity, location, and duration of droughts, heatwaves, and storms, and identify areas at high risk of extreme weather events. Volcanology can monitor volcanic activity through gas emissions, ground deformation, and remote sensing, allowing for the identification of hazardous regions and, in some cases, even forecasting eruptions, albeit with low confidence levels. More recently, machine learning and satellite data have shown promising results in identifying impending landslides.

In addition to forecasting, engineering now provides solutions to mitigate hazards, such as earthquake-resistant buildings, floodgates, and sea walls to minimize the impact of tsunamis and storms, as well as Early Warning Systems that provide information about impending hazards. NatureBased Solutions (NBS), which involve working with nature, have also been utilized, such as the restoration of wetlands or mangrove forests to protect coastal communities from flooding, or recovering degraded land to counter surface erosion.

Despite these advances and solutions, the International Disaster Database (www.emdat.be) recorded a staggering 8,556 disasters and more than 1.2 million fatalities between 2000 and the end of 2022. The Kahramanmaraş earthquake alone claimed over 53,000 people. Could some of these disasters have been avoided? If so, how?

The answer might be in multidisciplinary projects like Tomorrow’s Cities, an international urban disaster risk reduction consortium funded by the United Kingdom Research and Innovation Global Challenges Research Fund.

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Tomorrow’s Cities: reducing disaster risk for the poor Dr Sérgio Esperancinha, Professor John McCloskey, Professor Mark Pelling, Professor Iain Stewart, Tomorrow’s Cities

When in 2008 the United Nations estimated that, by the end of that year, half of the global population would be living in cities, it was signalling an unstoppable trend. Since then, this trend has gained momentum, with more people now living in urban areas than in rural regions across the globe.

In recent years, that trend accelerated with cities expanding at historically unprecedented rates. It is projected that by 2050, urban areas will have accommodated over two billion new inhabitants, resulting in a surge in the urban population to 70%.

At the same time, the current urbanisation trend has the potential to condemn hundreds of millions to a future dominated by repeated earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, heat waves and landslides, many exacerbated by climate change. This perfect storm of rapid urbanisation and pervasive threat presents the historical pinnacle of the growth of disaster risk globally. According to the 2022 UN Disaster Risk Reduction Office’s Global Assessment Report, medium and large-scale disasters are on the rise and, at the midway point in the UN’s Sendai Framework (2015–2030) timetable for disaster risk reduction, none of the major goals are on target.

Despite this, and with nearly 60% of the area projected to be urbanised by 2050 still to be developed, there is a time-limited opportunity to reduce risk stemming from the coalescence of multiple hazards and the poor urbanplanning decisions that lead to disasters. To achieve this, the conventional approach of managing disasters as isolated events, and the traditional risk assessment methods that focus on managing current risk to existing infrastructure and almost exclusively consider asset value of impacted buildings, is no longer fit for purpose. The root causes of systemic and multi-hazard risk develop over time through complex interactions between human and natural systems, so to manage, and especially to reduce, the risk of disasters, we must integrate multiple disciplines and perspectives, blending academic knowledge from the natural and social sciences and the situational knowledge of those living on the risk frontline.

That’s the approach that Tomorrow’s Cities, the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) Urban Disaster Risk Hub, is using.

Tomorrow’s Cities acknowledges that the fundamental causes of systemic and multi-hazard risk are rooted in human choices and the decisions that shape them, which can either promote resilience or exacerbate vulnerability and exposure.

Drawing on extensive research in disaster risk science, Tomorrow’s Cities is now utilising it to inform decision making and governance within the social context of risk. To achieve this, an international team of scientists is working towards reducing multi-hazard disaster risk for impoverished and marginalised populations in rapidly expanding cities, employing a people-centred and pro-poor approach to catalyse a shift from crisis management to risk-informed decision making in urban development and planning.

In pursuit of this goal, Tomorrow’s Cities has collaborated

with local teams in Quito, Istanbul, Kathmandu, and Nairobi to develop the Tomorrow’s Cities Decision Support Environment (TCDSE). The TCDSE employs an iterative approach with five distinct stages, facilitating inclusive and evidence-based decision making that leads to lowdisaster-risk and more equitable urban development.

“The fundamental causes of systemic and multi-hazard risk are rooted in human choices.”

The framework starts with an initial stage of Future Visioning, a co-production process whereby stakeholders carefully selected by Tomorrow’s Cities researchers to represent power imbalances relevant for a discussion about risk, gather to collectively imagine, discuss, and propose visions for the future of their city. During the process, participants express their past challenges, everyday life experiences, and future ideas, with a particular focus on hazard events.

On the next stage, Visioning Scenario Development, these visions are translated into tangible GIS-based spatial models which also consider the policies necessary to enhance the efficacy of the proposals against hazards.

Using the Visioning Scenarios, the Computational Model stage characterises the impacts of selected multi-hazards on the physical and social fabric defined in each. Addressing factors such as the displacement of low-income individuals, job losses, the rise in orphaned children, limited access to education for children, and the loss of healthcare services, the Tomorrow’s Cities framework overcomes the restrictions of traditional approaches to quantifying natural-hazard risks that primarily concentrate on direct economic losses arising from physical destruction. It acknowledges that the impact of $1 in losses resulting from direct physical damage is not uniform across diverse income groups; and that other factors, such as age, gender, disability, homelessness, sexual orientation and identity, and membership of indigenous groups, determine how calamities affect specific individuals or communities.

At the fourth stage of the TCDSE, Risk Agreement, researchers return to the stakeholders, to understand what the Impact Metrics mean to them. It is a process in which objective measurements of impacts are transformed into a co-produced and subjective definition of ‘Agreed Risk’, which accounts for the distinct perspectives of diverse stakeholders and supports a pioneering democratisation of the concept of risk.

On the last stage, researchers work with local authorities and communities to integrate the findings into ongoing propoor risk-based urban planning decision-making processes, including capacity building and citizen participation.

On the final year of funding, Tomorrow’s Cities is now recruiting up to six new cities to experience the TCDSE and to help us understand the consequences of current decisions on the futures of cities for hundreds of years.

20 Summer 2023

Lyse Doucet FRSGS: looking for light in dark places Jo Woolf FRSGS, RSGS Writer-in-Residence

The aerial footage is clear and shocking. A town has been reduced to rubble, save for a few broken buildings. Human figures stand on piles of shattered concrete. There is a sense that many more lie buried below. “A Syrian village,” explains Lyse Doucet, “which vanished in minutes. Its people are all that’s left standing – those who survived.”

Just hours after a double earthquake struck southern Syria and northern Turkey on 6th February, Lyse’s report for BBC News comes straight from the heart of the devastation.

Beside a collapsed building in Syria, Ismail Alabdallah, a member of the Opposition Civil Defence Unit, pleads with the international community to do something, his voice breaking with desperation. At a hospital overwhelmed with casualties, Dr Majdi Ibrahim asks for medical help in stricken areas. A survivor, Osama Abdel Hamid, says: “We were sleeping peacefully. At 4am we felt a huge earthquake. I woke up my wife and my children and we ran towards the exit door.

We opened it, and suddenly all the building collapsed.”

Lyse Doucet in Syria.

These Syrians have been living in a war zone for more than a decade. The additional catastrophe of an earthquake seems unutterably cruel. Lyse closes her report with a hint of hope: “Long-suffering Syrians have felt forgotten by the world. Reaching people across this broken country will be hard, but this disaster may make the world care again.”

Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief Political Correspondent, was born in New Brunswick in Canada. She studied political science at Queen’s University in Ontario, and then took a Masters degree in International Relations (with a focus on African agriculture) in Toronto. Her ambition to travel resulted in a four-month teaching post for Canadian Crossroads International at a village school on the Ivory Coast. By happy coincidence, the BBC was just opening its first West Africa Office in Abidjan, and this is how her career in journalism began.

In Turkey she has watched rescue teams with thermal cameras painstakingly sifting through the rubble, occasionally shouting an order of ‘Silence!’ to onlookers as they listened for the faint sounds of someone stirring. Survivors stood patiently, or sat on chairs close to where their relatives might still be buried, refusing to give up hope. Lyse says: “The hardest stories to hear were those that came from across the border in northern Syria, where so little aid arrived, where people pinned down by cement cried out for help but there was no one there to listen.”

But sometimes life triumphed over the odds.

“Is the world there?” asked Menekşe Tabak, a 70-year-old woman, when she was rescued from Kahramanmaraş in southern Turkey. When a 13-year-old girl emerged alive in Gaziantep, her rescuers shouted triumphantly: “You are a miracle!” On 7th February, a new-born baby was pulled to safety from a collapsed building in Syria. Her mother, father and four siblings had died. She was given the name Aya, meaning ‘miracle’.

Lyse spoke to Salim, a rescuer in Turkey, and reflected that he would remember these dark days forever. A smile lit up his tired face. What he would remember, he told her, would be the people he brought out alive.

For Lyse, the existence of hope in places of utter desolation has become an abiding source of positivity. She understands that audiences want to feel a sense of optimism, however fragile. “In the darkest moments,” she observes, “even the smallest light burns the brightest.”

She quotes Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who described himself as “a prisoner of hope”: she finds comfort in that expression, defining the human ability to find hope where there is apparently none.

“It is a conscious choice of empathy over emotion.”

Since then, Lyse has reported on key events in world history: the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya; the withdrawal of coalition forces from Afghanistan in 2021; the ongoing war in Syria, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

She has said that journalists must be the only people in the world who will immediately run towards an explosion, rather than away from it; even medical staff, she adds, will sometimes pause for a moment.

Ten days after the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, Lyse files a report for BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent.

“Search and rescue,” she says, “is a deadly serious business.”

Admiring what she calls “an uncommon, everyday kind of courage” in the people she meets, Lyse is still keenly aware that she is asking them to speak to her at a time of profound grief or suffering. Although she is often deeply moved, in her reports she steers away from sharing her personal response and focuses instead on asking the right questions and listening to the answers. It is a conscious choice of empathy over emotion. She explains: “Journalists are the storytellers, not the story.”

Over the last decade, in regions of catastrophe and conflict there has been a subtle shift in the focus and

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tone of news reporting. Fuelled by social media, individual human stories are taking centre stage; they speak to people’s hearts, inspiring worldwide solidarity and support. Lyse says that “sometimes the small stories have the power to tell you something much bigger, about a much bigger story.” Whether we are experiencing a natural disaster or man-made warfare, we all have the same basic needs: “Family, food, home, happiness, school, security – it’s the centre of all our lives. And for anyone who lives in an extreme environment, that is all they want – to return to the centre.”

“‘I learn enough of the language just to be able to tell a few jokes.’”

During her interview for RSGS, Lyse recalled a conversation she and her team had with their editor, as they prepared to report from Ukraine: “‘Do we have food and water to last three weeks?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you ready to live underground?’ ‘Yes, if necessary.’ ‘Are you ready to stay here if there’s troops out on the street?’ And in my case, I said yes.” When she is praised for her courage, Lyse points out that she is just one member of a team of camera operators and satellite engineers who have their own reasons for agreeing to stay on in a war zone. She also values the dedication of local journalists, who do a professional job while watching their beloved homeland being ravaged by war or disaster. “They enriched our understanding,” she says, “because they understood the feeling of a place. It wasn’t just a place on a map.”

Asked if she feels guilty about her ability to walk away, Lyse says she simply feels grateful for her life and the gifts that she enjoys every day, “to be living in a neighbourhood that I love to live in, a job that I love.” She acknowledges that, while technology has transformed our lives, we are still living in “the best of times and the worst of times.” We are privileged to live through pivotal moments in history, but sometimes we wish that we didn’t have to witness them.

Humour, she says, is a universal language that she uses constantly: “Even in the worst places in the world, people have this wicked sense of humour, or they have this black humour… I learn enough of the language just to be able to tell a few jokes because that is what keeps people going, no matter what the circumstances.”

These are the qualities that shape Lyse’s reports: humanity, curiosity and compassion, backed up by an ability to explain complex situations with absolute clarity. Journalism, she says, is defined by the kind of questions we ask, and she will continue to ask them. She carries with her a line from Seamus Heaney’s poem, Elegy: “The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.”

FURTHER READING

Lyse Doucet (15th February 2023) The Anger and Hope the Earthquake Left Behind (The New Statesman, www. newstatesman.com/world/europe/2023/02/anger-hopeearthquake-left-behind-turkey-syria, with paywall)

On 2nd March 2023, at a special event hosted by RSGS at the Soutar Theatre in Perth, Lyse Doucet was presented with the Mungo Park Medal, and chatted to RSGS Vice-President Dr Vanessa Collingridge about her experiences.

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Images of Türkiye and Syria 1. Sultanahmet, Türkiye. © Fatih Yürür | 2. Pamukkale, Türkiye. © Vladyslav Cherkasenko | 3. Mount Ararat, Türkiye. © Daniel Born | 4. Cappadocia, Türkiye. © Muzi Ntsaluba | 5. Cappadocia, Türkiye. © Igor Sporynin | 6. Kuşadası, Türkiye. © Mehmet Turgut Kirkgoz | 7. Syria. © Rami Maradni | 8. Umayyad Mosque, Damascus, Syria. © Wirestock | 9. Homs, Syria. © Ali Wannous | 10. Palmyra ancient city, Syria. © Ugurhan | 11. Aleppo Citadel, Syria. © Joel Carillet | 12. Aleppo, Syria. © Essa Mhmad 10.

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Marie Tharp and the theory of plate tectonics Lindis Kipp, Geography student, University of Stirling

The theory of plate tectonics is now the most widely accepted explanation for many geological phenomena, but it was only in 1971 it became, as J Tuzo Wilson said, “the orthodoxy of the great majority.” One of the geologists without whose contributions this paradigm shift would not have been possible is Marie Tharp. Her discovery of the mid-oceanic rifts and creation of the Heezen-Tharp map of the ocean, as well as her plotting of seismic activity as occurring within the rifts, provided crucial evidence to convince others of the reality of seafloor spreading. Yet while many of the men she worked with are wellknown and established geologists, Marie Tharp’s name remains largely unknown.

companies. Marie Tharp was tasked with taking this plethora of data and devising a method for turning it into a map.

Tharp and Heezen faced difficulty in creating their map of the ocean floor through military restrictions.

The US government had classified all new bathymetric measurements in 1952 to retain the upper hand in anti-submarine warfare. This led to the choice of creating a physiographic map rather than a bathymetric map, allowing Tharp to extrapolate and fill in areas for which she had insufficient data. Incidentally, this made the final map far more accessible and understandable to the public.

“Marie Tharp was tasked with taking this plethora of data and devising a method for turning it into a map.”

The idea of continents having moved over the lifespan of our planet was first proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1915. He presented a plethora of evidence, ranging from fossil records and glacial striation patterns to paleoclimatic evidence and contemporary distribution of earthworm species. Wegener used the present-day shape of the continents to extrapolate how the landmasses may have moved in the past. His ideas were widely discounted because he could not explain by what mechanism these movements would occur.

Advances in geological research after World War II, such as Blackett, Runcorn and Irving’s work in paleomagnetism and apparent polar wander, were throwing up new questions about the history of the continents. Evidence that Wegener had proposed was being revisited in light of these new discoveries, but there was still no satisfactory mechanism to explain the apparent movement of continents. Many geologists, particularly in the USA, were still convinced of geosynclinal theory or Earth contraction, while even those who did believe in mobilism favoured the expanding Earth theory.

Tharp was born in the USA in 1920 to a German teacher and a soil surveyor. She spent a significant amount of her childhood accompanying her father on map-making trips, laying the foundations for her later skills. World War II and the subsequent shortage of men led to her being one of only ten women accepted on the University of Michigan’s accelerated petroleum geology degree. Her classes spanned a wide variety of topics such as petrography and structural geology. She graduated with a Masters in Geology and worked for an oil company for three years. Finding the work unrewarding, she left to study mathematics and having obtained her Bachelor she joined Maurice Ewing’s Lamont Geological Observatory. Despite being more qualified than many of the men working on the team, she was employed not as a scientist but as an assistant to Bruce Heezen and was excluded from research at sea until the 1960s.

Heezen and the Lamont observatory where Tharp worked benefited greatly from military Cold War funding of ocean floor exploration, as well as private money from the Bell Laboratories who wanted Heezen’s help to lay cross-Atlantic telecommunications cables. This patronage also meant Heezen had access to a much wider variety of ocean floor data, both through government expeditions and through cable-splicing records from a host of telecommunications

In 1952, Marie Tharp was evaluating the depthsounding data Heezen’s expeditions had collected and noticed “the only consistent match-up was a V-shaped indentation in the center of the profiles.” She saw that this was evidence of a rift along the ocean floor. Heezen was initially dismissive of her findings, considering them “girl talk”, and asked her to redo her calculations, but accepted her findings when they did not change upon recalculation. He compared the topographic profiles of the Rift Valley in Africa to the profile Tharp had compiled for the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and could not deny the similarities.

Heezen published the findings in 1956; Tharp was not named in the paper. Despite this, Heezen remained adamantly opposed to the ideas of sea floor spreading and continental drift, writing in 1965 “The Mid-Oceanic Ridge appears to be a feature created by extension of the Earth’s crust” and “a general expansion of the Earth […] explains the sea floor tectonic fabric”.

Over several years and using increasingly precise data from many international contributors including Russian scientists, Tharp and Heezen realised there was indeed a rift valley in the centre of the ocean. Their findings were initially met with scepticism. Tharp, Heezen, and Howard Forster found further evidence by aligning Forster’s map of earthquakes with Tharp’s map of the ocean floor. They found that the earthquakes were all taking place within the rift valley. Tharp used Forster’s data to extrapolate the line of the rift in unsurveyed parts of the ocean, showing the rift extended around the entire world. This plotting evidence, as well as Jacques Cousteau’s 1959 video evidence of the rift, eventually convinced many of the sceptics. Their physiographic approach allowed them to define three major topographic areas in the oceans: continental margins, abyssal plains, and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The symmetry of these areas on either side of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, when combined with marine magnetic anomaly data, proved to be crucial in establishing the theory of seafloor spreading later popularised by Harry Hess.

Tharp, Heezen and their collaborators continued to work on their maps, refining them as new data became available.

In 1967, National Geographic commissioned a map of the Indian Ocean floor. Tharp and Heezen worked together with

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Manuscript painting of Heezen–Tharp World Ocean Floor map by Berann (1977), available at www.loc.gov/item/2010586277.

Austrian artist Heinrich Berann to produce the map and later three more, including the World Ocean Floor map in 1977.

The topographic approach of this map and its publication by National Geographic allowed the wider public to truly visualise the ocean floor for the first time.

Marie Tharp’s contribution to modern day geology is undoubtedly monumental: her map drafting skill revealed crucial information which led to the establishment of the theory of plate tectonics. Frequently uncredited during her working life and dropped from academic partnerships after Heezen’s death in 1977, she was undaunted and continued her mapping work privately as the Marie Tharp Corporation. She received recognition late in life when she was named as one of the four great cartographers of the twentieth century by the US Library of Congress in 1997 and in 1999, aged 79, she received the Mary Sears Women Pioneers in Oceanography Award from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Since 2015, Google Earth has offered a Marie Tharp Historical Map overlay showing her map superimposed on the globe and accessible to the world to explore.

“Marie Tharp’s contribution to modern day geology is undoubtedly monumental.”

The Heezen–Tharp map, together with advances in paleomagnetic research and Wegener’s original evidence, was pulled together into Harry Hess’s ‘essay on geopoetry’ and helped to establish the theory of seafloor spreading. Tharp’s discovery of the mid-ocean ridges and the rifts within provide the foundation for this theory. As Tharp said herself, “You can’t find anything bigger than that, at least on this planet.”

This short essay was originally set as a first-year assignment to introduce students to scientific writing as part of an introductory geology module. Students were allowed to choose their essay topic and Lindis chose to write about Marie Tharp. I hadn’t heard of Marie, I didn’t know of her contributions to our understanding of plate tectonics, and knew nothing about what she had to overcome to ensure her work was recognised. I hope you enjoy this essay as much I did, and you also learn more about this incredible woman.

Dr Eileen Tisdall, University of Stirling

FURTHER READING

C Barton (2002) Marie Tharp, oceanographic cartographer, and her contributions to the revolution in the Earth sciences (Geological Society Special Publication, www.lyellcollection. org/doi/10.1144/GSL.SP.2002.192.01.11).

R E Doel, T J Levin, M K Marker (2006) Extending modern cartography to the ocean depths: military patronage, Cold War priorities, and the Heezen–Tharp mapping project, 1952– 1959 (Journal of Historical Geography, doi.org/10.1016/j. jhg.2005.10.011) B M Higgs (2021) Understanding the Earth: the contribution of Marie Tharp (Geological Society Special Publication, www. lyellcollection.org/doi/10.1144/SP506-2019-248) Marie Tharp (1999) Connect the Dots: Mapping the Seafloor and Discovering the Mid-Ocean Ridge, in Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia: Twelve Perspectives on the First Fifty Years 1949-1999, edited by Laurence Lippsett (www.whoi.edu/news-insights/content/marie-tharp)

26 Summer 2023

Can climate affect earthquakes, or are the connections shaky?

Alan Buis, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

There are lots of myths about earthquakes. A common one is that there’s such a thing as ‘earthquake weather’ – certain types of weather conditions that typically precede earthquakes. The myth stems from the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who proposed in the fourth century BC that earthquakes were caused by trapped winds escaping from subterranean caves. He believed the large amounts of air trapped underground would make weather on Earth’s surface before a quake hot and calm.

Lundgren says it gets much more difficult, however, to make such inferences about larger earthquakes. “We’ve seen that relatively small stress changes due to climate-like forcings can effect microseismicity,” he said. “A lot of small fractures in Earth’s crust are unstable. We see also that tides can cause faint Earth tremors known as microseisms. But the real problem is taking our knowledge of microseismicity and scaling it up to apply it to a big quake, or a quake of any size that people could feel, really.” Climate-related stress changes might or might not promote an earthquake to occur, but we have no way of knowing by how much.

“Changes in stress loads on Earth’s crust from periods of drought can be significant.”

With the advent of seismology, we now know that most quakes are caused by tectonic processes; forces within the solid Earth that drive changes in the structure of Earth’s crust, primarily the rupture of underground rock masses along faults (linear zones of weakness). We also know that most earthquakes occur far beneath Earth’s surface, well beyond the influence of surface temperatures and conditions. Finally, we know the statistical distribution of earthquakes is approximately equal across all types of weather conditions. Myth busted.

In fact, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS), the only correlation that’s been noted between earthquakes and weather is that large changes in atmospheric pressure caused by major storms like hurricanes have been shown to occasionally trigger ‘slow earthquakes’, which release energy over comparatively long periods of time and don’t result in ground shaking like traditional earthquakes do. They note that while such large low-pressure changes could potentially be a contributor to triggering a damaging earthquake, “the numbers are small and are not statistically significant.”

“We don’t know when a fault may be at the critical point where a non-tectonic forcing related to a climate process could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, resulting in a sizeable earthquake, and why then and not earlier?” he said. “We’re simply not in a position at this point to say that climate processes could trigger a large quake.”

What about droughts?

We know seasonal effects can cause changes on faults, but what about less periodic climate phenomena, like a long-term drought? Might they cause changes too?

Weighing the seismic consequences of water

As it turns out, changes in stress loads on Earth’s crust from periods of drought can be significant. Research in 2017 using data from a network of high-precision GPS stations in California, Oregon and Washington found that alternating periods of drought and heavy precipitation in the Sierra Nevada between 2011 and 2017 actually caused the mountain range to rise by nearly an inch and then fall by half that amount, as the mountain rocks lost water during the drought and then regained it. The study didn’t specifically look at potential impacts on faults, but such stress changes could potentially be felt on faults in or near the range.

In order to make any connection between climate and earthquakes, says Lundgren, you first have to determine what kinds of tectonic processes might be related to climate phenomena. Scientists know earthquakes can be triggered or inhibited by changes in the amount of stress on a fault.

The largest climate variable that could change fault stress loads is surface water in the form of rain and snow. Lundgren says several studies have supported such correlations. But there’s a catch. “Typically, where we’ve seen these types of correlations is in microseismicity; tiny earthquakes with magnitudes less than zero, far smaller than humans can feel,” he said. “Those occur quite frequently.”

Similarly, pumping of groundwater from underground aquifers by humans, which is exacerbated during times of drought, has also been shown to impact patterns of stress loads by ‘unweighting’ Earth’s crust. Lundgren pointed to a 2014 study in the journal Nature, that looked at the effects of groundwater extraction in California’s Central Valley on seismicity on the adjacent San Andreas Fault. The researchers found that such extractions can promote lateral changes in stress to the two sides of the San Andreas, which move horizontally against each other along the boundary of two major tectonic plates. This could potentially cause them to unclamp and slip, resulting in an earthquake.

Lundgren cited work by Jean-Philippe Avouac at Caltech and others, who’ve found a correlation between the amount of microseismicity in the Himalaya and the annual monsoon season. During the summer months, large amounts of precipitation fall on the Indo-Gangetic Plain, which encompasses the northern regions of the Indian subcontinent. This increases stress loads on Earth’s crust there and decreases levels of microseismicity in the adjacent Himalaya. During the winter dry season, when there’s less water weight on Earth’s crust in the plain, Himalayan microseismicity peaks.

“Such stresses are small, but if you have groundwater pumping over a long period of time, then they could become more significant,” he said. “Even though such changes might be small compared with stress changes caused by the normal build-up of stress on a fault from tectonic processes, it could potentially hasten the onset of the next big quake on the San Andreas. In addition, because the amount of slip on a fault increases with time between earthquakes, this could result in more frequent but smaller quakes.”

But what about climate? Are there any connections between climate phenomena and earthquakes? We asked geophysicist Paul Lundgren of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to do a scientific shakedown on the matter.

However, says Lundgren, the Fort Tejon segment of the San Andreas Fault that is nearest to the Central Valley last

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ruptured in 1857, so given the erratic nature of earthquakes along the fault and the great variability in time between events, with our current level of knowledge, scientists are far from understanding when and where the next large earthquake will occur on it.

Fire and ice: glaciers and tectonic processes Another climate-related phenomenon that’s believed to have connections to tectonic processes is glaciation. The retreat of a glacier can reduce stress loads on Earth’s crust underneath, impacting the movement of subsurface magma. A study in the journal Geology on volcanic activity in Iceland between 4,500 and 5,500 years ago, when Earth was much cooler than today, found a link between deglaciation and increased volcanic activity. Conversely, when glacial cover increased, eruptions declined.

The rapid movement of glaciers has also been shown to cause what are known as glacial earthquakes. Glacial earthquakes in Greenland peak in frequency in the summer months and have been steadily increasing over time, possibly in response to global warming.

Human uses of water and induced seismicity In addition to climate-related impacts of water on seismicity, human management and applications of water can also affect earthquakes through a phenomenon known as induced seismicity.

For example, water stored in large dams has been linked to earthquake activity in various locations around the world, though the impact is localized in nature. In 1975, approximately eight years after Northern California’s Lake Oroville reservoir was created behind the Oroville Dam, a series of earthquakes occurred nearby, the largest registering magnitude 5.7. Shortly after the water in the reservoir was drawn down to its lowest level since it was originally filled in order to repair intakes to the dam’s power plant and then refilled, the earthquakes occurred.

to increases in the practice of injecting wastewater into the ground during petroleum operations. Injection wells place fluids underground into porous geologic formations, where scientists believe they can sometimes enter buried faults that are ready to slip, changing the pore pressure on them and causing them to slip.

Getting the big picture of the Earth system’s interconnectivity Lundgren says when he first started studying earthquakes, everything was focused on understanding them within the context of plate tectonics and processes happening within Earth’s crust. But that’s now changing.

“Glacial earthquakes in Greenland peak in frequency in the summer months.”

“In the past decade or so, with the widespread adoption of new technologies such as GPS that have greater spatial distribution and sensitivity, people have also begun looking at other second-order effects; other factors that might have an influence on earthquakes,” he said.

“It’s very intriguing to be able to find potential links between earthquakes and climate, such as seasonal differences.

The challenge, however, is squaring such connections with fundamental physics.

“We’re not close to being able to predict when an earthquake may occur as a result of climate processes,” he concluded.

“Even if we know that some outside climate process is potentially affecting a fault system, since we don’t know the fault’s potential state of readiness to break, we can’t yet make that extra inference to say, ah ha, I might get a quake a week or a month later.”

What these studies do emphasize is the incredible complexity of our Earth system. Continued research will help us better unravel how its various components are interconnected, sometimes in surprising ways.

Several studies investigating the quakes concluded that fluctuations in the reservoir level, and corresponding changes in the weight of the reservoir, changed the stress loads on a local fault, triggering the quakes. Monitoring of earthquake activity at the reservoir in the years following the quakes established a seasonal correlation between the reservoir’s level and seismicity. Seismicity decreases as the reservoir fills in winter and spring, and the largest earthquakes tend to occur as the reservoir level falls in the summer and fall.

Induced seismicity can also occur when human water applications lubricate a fault. Studies by USGS and others have linked sharp increases in earthquake activity in Midwest and Eastern US states

© Dave Goudreau from Unsplash.

This article was extracted with permission from a fuller version which is available on NASA’s Global Climate Change Website (climate.nasa.gov/news/2926/can-climate-affectearthquakes-or-are-the-connections-shaky).

28 Summer 2023

Resilience: why earthquake hazard and risk modelling matters John Schneider and Jephraim Oro, Global Earthquake Model (GEM) Foundation

The Global Earthquake Model (GEM) Foundation is a collaborative effort to develop earthquake hazard and risk models for calculating human and economic losses from earthquakes. These models are crucial for risk management applications such as building and infrastructure design standards, insurance and risk transfer, national risk assessments, and public risk awareness and education.

After two strong earthquakes devastated Turkey and Syria in February, public and private institutions as well as academia evaluated their respective earthquake loss models and compared them to ground observations and reports.

If a model under- or overestimates losses, it may indicate that model input data, such as seismic hazard, building vulnerability, building type and cost, and population, need re-evaluation and recalibration. Significantly deviating model loss estimates can also impact disaster risk reduction strategies.

Earthquake modelling provides insight into what could happen in a specific location if an earthquake occurs.

Accurately forecasting losses for a particular earthquake event or scenario can improve building codes, direct urban development to areas with lower seismic activity probability, enhance disaster risk reduction strategies, and promote community resilience. From 1998 to 2017, earthquakes were the primary cause of fatalities due to natural hazards, accounting for 56% of the 1.3 million fatalities and costing $661 billion or 23% of the $2.9 trillion reported economic losses.

Since 2009, GEM has been at the forefront of developing open analysis tools, global databases, models at various scales, and capacities of disaster risk reduction scholars and practitioners to combat the damaging effects of earthquakes. Building collapse due to poorly constructed buildings and non-adherence to land-use zoning and building codes are the primary causes of fatalities and injuries from earthquakes. Limited knowledge and understanding of citizens regarding risks and mitigation measures around disasters can also contribute to less demand for accountability.

inclusiveness and participation, and prioritising public interest, GEM believes we can significantly reduce fatalities, injuries, and economic losses from earthquake damage.

GEM’s work over the past decade in various countries has accelerated risk assessment and the inclusion of risk-based decisions into planning and sustainable development by merging public and private sector interests and collaborating with local governments. GEM employs an inclusive and collaborative approach to earthquake model development that establishes trust with local partners and stakeholders through technical support and training, ensuring the involvement of local scientists, experts, and decision-makers from the outset.

Without earthquake models, it is difficult to prevent, mitigate, and prepare adequately for the catastrophic effects of earthquakes, and achieving earthquake resilience is even more challenging. However, by making this tool accessible, scientists, researchers, and engineers can run hundreds and even thousands of earthquake scenarios to identify conditions and locations with the highest seismic risk and estimate how destructive an earthquake would be in terms of damage to property and fatalities.

By openly sharing and disseminating information generated by earthquake models, disaster risk reduction managers and practitioners can create the right plan for prevention, mitigation, and emergency response and recovery after an earthquake.

On 13th June 2023, GEM will present the new global earthquake hazard and risk models, maps, and databases and discuss recent developments and future directions in earthquake resilience with leading researchers and risk management experts worldwide.

“We can significantly reduce fatalities, injuries, and economic losses from earthquake damage.”

GEM’s global earthquake hazard and risk model is a significant milestone in developing a unified view of seismic risk.

The model comprises three components: a hazard model that defines where, how often and how severely earthquakes will strike in the future; an exposure model that describes the elements at risk, particularly buildings/infrastructure and people; and vulnerability curves or models that describe the relationship between shaking intensity and damage or loss to elements at risk. By better understanding earthquake risk, developing the capacity of disaster risk reduction practitioners, promoting transparent risk assessment tools, adhering to scientific methodologies,

Rescue operations in Afrin’s Jindires in NW Syria. © North Press Agency

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Figure 1. Global Active Faults Database.

Understanding seismic hazard and risk: key insights A key database underpinning our understanding of earthquake hazards worldwide is GEM’s Global Active Faults Database (Figure 1), which represents our global understanding of earthquake faults that are known to be capable of causing earthquakes under current-day tectonic forces. It is a global dataset of active fault traces for seismic hazard modelling and other tectonic applications.

It provides GIS files with fault geometry, kinematics, slip rate, and other relevant attributes. The dataset is available for free under a Creative Commons licence and covers most deforming continental regions on Earth, except for a few places. You can view the data on an interactive map at blogs. openquake.org/hazard/global-active-fault-viewer.

The Global Exposure Database (Figure 2) provides information about building and population globally and underpins the calculation of risk. The 2018.1 version of the

global exposure model contains 1.3 billion residential, 90.9 million commercial, and 35.5 million industrial buildings, with an aggregated replacement cost of USD 203.6 trillion.

Most of the total cost (76%) is distributed across 15 countries.

The Global Earthquake Risk model that GEM produced in 2018 is the most comprehensive global evaluation of earthquake risk to date (Figure 3). It can aid decisionmakers in identifying regions vulnerable to higher and more frequent earthquake-induced hazards and losses, categorising high-vulnerability building types, and devising strategies for effective risk mitigation. Global distribution of average annual losses normalised by the construction cost per unit of area (USD/m2). This model estimates a yearly economic loss of USD45 billion globally, with an average of 681,000 dwellings (assuming a typical size of 91m2) lost due to earthquakes, equivalent to an average annual loss of a built-up area of 64 million square metres.

Figure 2. Global Exposure Map (v2018.1).

Figure 3. Global Seismic Risk Map (v2018.1).

30 Summer 2023

notes from the classroom

Environmental Hazards: Turkey–Syria earthquake 2023 Graham Oliver, Teacher of Geography, Dollar Academy

Natural hazards are extreme events that can cause loss of life, extreme damage to property, and disruption of human activities. Whilst the UK is ostensibly immune to tectonic hazards, our understanding of the impacts elsewhere in the world can provide insight into the socio-economic conditions which prevail, as well as a cautious reminder of the power our planet possesses.

In the National 5 Geography course, pupils need to focus on the causes, impacts and management strategies. This report will focus on the first of these, providing an overview of why the earthquake took place and why so much damage occurred.

As of 6th March 2023, the earthquake doublet which devastated Turkey and Syria has claimed over 45,000 lives, injured a further 100,000, and is estimated to have directly impacted 26 million people across Turkey and Syria, with many rendered homeless, across almost a dozen cities.

Turkey has an estimated $34 billion in damages, which equates to approximately 4% of the country’s annual economic output. This, in addition to the estimated $5.1 billion in direct physical damages in Syria, accounts for 10% of their GDP. Physical causes Earthquakes are sudden, often violent shaking of the ground, and on 6th February 2023, at 04:17 TRT (local time), a moment magnitude (MW) 7.8 earthquake struck southern and central Turkey and northern and western regions of Syria. The effects of the initial quake were further amplified by a second earthquake, of MW7.6, just over nine hours later, to the north-northeast of the initial quake, in the Kahramanmaraş Province. In the aftermath, more than 11,000 aftershocks continued to affect the region, further disrupting recovery efforts.

Geologically, the context here is complex, with the area affected by the interaction between three tectonic plates: the African, Arabian and Anatolian Plates respectively. Despite the overall movement of the three plates, moving north towards the Eurasian Plate, major faults in the region have segmented the crust into numerous strike-slip fault configurations (conservative plate margins).

The size and shallow nature of the earthquake resulted in significant shaking. The shallow focus of the quake in this scenario, only 18km deep, meant that limited energy was attenuated before reaching the surface. The subsequent aftershock, MW7.5, was even shallower, only 10km.

The geographical extent of the seismic activity was farreaching as it mirrors the extent of the Anatolian Fault Line: a huge area, with an estimated crustal displacement of over 300km and surface rupture displacements of up to 8m.

Equipped with the knowledge of tectonic intricacies in the region, and an appreciation of the devastating impacts, the Turkish authorities had already published seismic hazard maps. Clearly shown are both the North and East Anatolian faults, traversing the entire country, in addition to other subtle minor faulting in the region.

Human causes The epicentre of the first quake (MW7.8) was only 23 miles northwest of Gaziantep, a city with a population of over two million. The epicentre of the second quake (MW7.5) was near Ekinözü, 60 miles northeast of the first quake.

The population density of the region is also reasonably high, and with the ongoing Syrian conflict resulting in millions of Syrians crossing into Turkey, there is a large concentration of refugees in the area.

“The geographical extent of the seismic activity was far-reaching.”

More than 160,000 buildings collapsed or were severely damaged in Turkey after the quakes, raising questions about whether the natural disaster’s impact was made worse by human failings.

The time of day must be taken into consideration.

The quake hit at just after 0400 local time, when most people were asleep. Too many of the The 5m horizontal displacement of the surface distorted the rails of the railway. Source: The Universe. Space. Tech buildings in the region (universemagazine.com/en/earthquake-in-turkey-forms-a-300were not constructed kilometer-fault-in-the-earths-crust) to cope with the violent shaking, and as a result, many collapsed.

Many landslides were also triggered across the region, and liquefaction, associated with the ground shaking, is also likely to impact infrastructure throughout the region.

Fire, another secondary hazard, resulted from broken gas pipes and damaged electricity pylons, and water leakages from damaged water pipes resulted in localised flooding, whilst also serving to hamper rescue efforts.

Isostatic sea-level changes are local changes caused by subsidence or uplift of the crust. With the vast displacement in the Earth’s crust, it is perhaps unsurprising that coastal areas were hit with the added impact of local sea-level rise.

As seawater encroached 200 metres inland following the earthquake, the city of İskenderun in Turkey was impacted by widespread flooding.

All in all, the devastating events which unfolded in Turkey and Syria prove tragically, once more, that the risk people face from natural hazards is often more to do with their inherent vulnerabilities than simply the nature of the physical hazard itself.

Where do hazards fit into the Geography curriculum in schools?

In the Broad General Education (BGE) stage of a Scottish education, the topic of plate tectonics is often covered when considering processes which form and shape landscapes. There is a requirement to describe the physical processes of a natural disaster and to discuss its impact on people and the landscape.

Environmental Hazards is an optional Global Issue in the National 5 Geography curriculum in Scottish schools. This topic is case study based with the requirement to cover an example of a tropical storm, an earthquake and a volcanic eruption. As well as covering the main features of the hazard in general, pupils cover the causes, impacts and methods for management of each case study example. Impacts cover both people and the landscape.

Management includes predication and planning as well as the strategies adopted in response to an event.

This article is about the causes of the Turkey–Syria earthquake, written from the perspective of providing a helpful resource for a teacher using this as a case study.

notes from the classroom Geographer The

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Turkey and Syria’s devastating earthquakes Andrew England, Alan Smith, Graham Parrish and Steven Bernard, Financial Times

When a huge earthquake struck south-eastern Turkey and neighbouring Syria at 4.17am local time on Monday, it flattened buildings and killed thousands of people across the two countries.

The 7.8 magnitude quake is the worst to hit Turkey since 1939, when an earthquake in the east of the country killed around 33,000 people.

The tremors from Monday’s quake were felt as far away as Egypt, Lebanon and Israel. A powerful aftershock of magnitude 7.5 followed at 1.24pm. The quakes affected an exceptionally large area, causing shaking and destruction across a region that is around 12 times the size of Belgium.

Size and scale The powerful earthquakes in Turkey and Syria on 6th February. All times are local. *Modified Mercalli Intensity scale. Cartography: Steven Bernard.

The epicentre of the main Sources: Ahlenius, Nordpil and Bird; USGS; WorldPop; FT research. © FT earthquake was at the southEarthquakes are common in western end of the East and around Turkey and Syria, Anatolian fault, near its junction with the Dead Sea fault but Monday’s 7.8 quake is system. The quake’s impact on the surface was compounded the largest in the region so far by its relatively shallow depth of 18km. The aftershock this century. Monday’s natural hit about 100km farther north nine hours later at an even disaster struck cities and shallower depth of just 10km. towns where many buildings are vulnerable to shocks, which The low depths of the earthquakes added to their impact on experts said was because of low-quality construction and a populations hundreds of kilometres away in all directions lack of earthquake resilience. because shaking intensity is higher the closer an earthquake Human impact is to the surface. The US Geological Survey estimated that more than 21 million people experienced a shake intensity of The earthquakes have led to a devastating death toll in Turkey ‘strong’ or above. The worst affected areas in Turkey are the and Syria, which is expected to rise. By Thursday afternoon, provinces of Kahramanmaraş, Hatay, Gaziantep and Adıyaman.

Turkey had confirmed 16,170 people had been killed in the In Syria, the quakes hit the provinces of Idlib and Aleppo as earthquakes with thousands more injured. Syrian government well as the coastal regions of Latakia and Tartus. and civil defence officials have confirmed at least 3,162 deaths. Rescue teams are working through the night to pull Geology survivors from the rubble across southern Turkey and northern The East Anatolian fault responsible for Monday’s disaster has Syria. But freezing weather, snow and damaged infrastructure been relatively quiet in recent decades, which explains in part are making it challenging to transport aid, personnel and heavy the tremendous energy released by this week’s earthquakes. machinery.

Global and regional context This article (first published on 9th February) is reproduced from Significant earthquakes have struck other countries this year, the Financial Times, which offers free online access to students including Indonesia, Vanuatu and Argentina, but Turkey and aged 16-19, their teachers and schools. Registration and details Syria’s 7.8 quake is the largest by magnitude globally so are at ft.com/schools. far. The scale used to measure the strength of earthquakes Read the article and then answer the questions. is based on a log scale, which means that earthquakes with • Outline the characteristics of the earthquakes that struck Turkey similar-sounding magnitudes are in fact very different in and Syria on 6th February. size. The TNT equivalent, a linear scale based on the energy • Discuss how the social and economic impacts of this earthquake released from the equivalent amount of TNT explosive, of the compare with other major earthquakes over the past 50 years.

7.8 magnitude quake in Turkey and Syria is around 7.5mn • Investigate why many buildings in Turkey are not aseismic or tons, compared with estimates of 3.8mn tons for Indonesia’s earthquake resistant.

7.6 magnitude quake and 239,000 tons for Argentina’s 6.8 Alasdair Monteith, Gordonstoun magnitude quake.

“The earthquakes have led to a devastating death toll in Turkey and Syria.”

32 Summer 2023

Chile and its largest earthquakes Sergio Barrientos and Sebastián Riquelme, National Seismological Centre, University of Chile

Chile is amongst the most seismically active countries in the world. Not only in terms of the number of events per year but also for the large extent they can reach and the tsunamis they can generate. Since the arrival of the Spaniards who started the written record in the mid-1500s, a magnitude 8 or more earthquake has taken place, on average, every dozen years. “….with so much rumble, force and movement so the buildings – that had been made for more than a hundred years – began to fall.” This is a description of the first large earthquake reported in Santiago, in 1647. It is estimated that one-fifth of the population was killed at that time, with a tremendous impact on the economy; taxes to the crown were exempted for six years. The deadliest earthquake in this country took place in 1939, with an uncertain number of fatalities, varying between 5,000 and 28,000.

“Horizontal changes made Chile extend its area by approximately 800 hectares.”

When considering the last 100 years, 11 events with a magnitude around 8 or larger have taken place. Studies have evidenced several earthquakes of this sequence with magnitudes close to 9 and above. Such extreme seismic activity is a result of the interaction of the Nazca, Antarctic, Scotia, and South American plates in southwestern South America, where Chile is located.

Amongst these events is the M9.5 Valdivia event of 22nd May 1960, the largest earthquake ever recorded since the beginning of instrumental seismology in the late 1800s.

The exact number of fatalities is not known but has been estimated between 2,000 and 5,000. The major shock was preceded by an M8.1 precursor 33 hours earlier, at 6am local time on 21st May. Uplift of nearly 6m of Guamblin Island, and subsidence of nearly 3m in Valdivia, are extreme examples of land level changes produced by the displacement of the order of 40m of the Nazca plate under the South American plate during the 1960 earthquake.

The rupture, which extended for nearly 1,000km, radiated energy for more than five minutes. The corresponding submarine elevation changes were responsible for a Pacific-wide tsunami that produced damage not only along the Chilean coast, with 15m high waves, but also casualties as far as Hawaii, the Philippines, and Japan. These dramatic local elevation changes were responsible for a worldwide sea level rise of 1.7mm. Horizontal changes, generated by the sudden release of energy in response to the centennial compression of the South American plate being pushed by the Nazca plate, made Chile extend its area by approximately 800 hectares.

Two days later, the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcanic complex erupted, adding more misery to the local inhabitants. Massive landslides blocked rivers, creating dangerous dams for people living downstream. Twenty-fourhour work to lower the water level had to be conducted on one of them, the San Pedro River, because nearly 400 years earlier a similar earthquake/landslide sequence had flooded villages downstream taking the lives of more than 1,200 natives.

Since 1960, several magnitude 8 events have taken place in Chile, but the latest example of a giant earthquake is the M8.8 of 27th February 2010, an event that affected the central part of Chile. A seismic gap had been identified previously in the area, where no large earthquakes had taken place since 1835, an event vividly described by Darwin who directly suffered the consequences of the passage of the waves at the time of his voyage in the Beagle. More than 500 fatalities and more than 800,000 affected people, from both the shaking and the tsunami, were associated with the 2010 event. This earthquake, which lasted two minutes at the source, affected the most populous part of the country where the economic damage reached about 17% of the GDP. A fault rupture of approximately 400km, oriented in a north-south direction, accommodated a maximum of 20m of displacement of the Nazca plate under the South American plate. As was the case with the 1960 earthquake, due to this large displacement, a large trans-Pacific tsunami was generated with a significant impact along the Chilean coast.

These two giant earthquakes are amongst the largest events ever recorded in instrumental times, causing great damage to the country, in terms of both fatalities and economic damage. Chile is still learning how to cope with these hazards and has passed the test after two large earthquakes took place in 2014 (M8.2) and 2015 (M8.3). Proper tsunami warnings were issued with their corresponding evacuation executed. National building codes have been updated after every large earthquake where new information has been gathered. It has been a long and hard way to reduce disaster risk due to earthquakes and tsunamis, and we continue to struggle; however, we always expect Nature to come up with surprises.

Nowadays, Chile is incorporating new technologies such as earthquake early warning to anticipate earthquakes for a few seconds, seismogeodetic signals to measure on-scale ground displacements and velocities in the near field, submarine cables incorporating distributed acoustic sensing to record ground motions along fibre optic cables, artificial intelligence to automate earthquake detection, and crowdsourcing seismology to gather information from people in real time. These observations will enhance our knowledge of earthquakes, tsunamis, the Earth’s interior, and geodynamics. Furthermore, our capabilities of earthquake monitoring in real time will improve and we could issue more accurate and faster earthquake and tsunami warnings.

Chile’s seismicity is originated from the interaction of four major plates. Nazca and South America converge at a rate of 6.5cm per annum, so large earthquakes (~M8), in the same region along this contact, take place between 100 and 150 years. Larger shocks, such as the 1960 and 2010 events, have longer repeat times.

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Japan: nuclear energy, earthquakes and tsunamis Professor Sue Dawson, Energy, Environment and Society, University of Dundee

It is 12 years since the Japan, or Tōhoku, earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, a ‘triple hit’ of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident. This mega-disaster led to widespread devastation in the coastal zone, even for one of the world’s most prepared and resilient countries when dealing with natural hazards. As Japan-wide, including Fukushima, reactors have sat idle for over a decade, Japan now considers a return to nuclear as a major player in response to the problems of global energy supply. This would signal a clear policy change since the meltdown at the plant. The idea that new and existing reactors with improved safety can help the drive towards net zero for Japan by 2050 is gaining traction. How does this turnaround affect the population still nervous of a return to full nuclear power generation?

On 11th March 2011, one of the fifth-strongest earthquakes ever recorded struck off the northeast coast of Japan. This led to a devastating mega-tsunami that impacted hundreds of kilometres along the Tōhoku coast, and killed over 20,000 people. The strength and height of the tsunami overtopped existing sea walls, inundating coastal communities, and led to a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power station and widespread evacuation of towns and cities across the coastal zone. This type of cascading hazard overwhelmed the response to the disaster, despite an extensive historical and well-studied geological record of earthquakes and tsunamis extending over thousands of years.

straddling multiple tectonic plate boundaries, means that the discussion is when not if there will be another major earthquake. The risk of megathrust earthquakes along these tectonic plate boundaries drives the seismic risk in this area, with events linked to large magnitudes and particularly short return periods.

Research suggests a likelihood of a 70% chance that a magnitude 7 earthquake will occur under Tokyo, one of the world’s largest megacities, by 2050. Continued refinement of disaster management strategies, extensive community preparedness, and the understanding of Japan’s wider risk to the unique vulnerability that cascading hazards bring, allow the greatest potential to limit a more devastating impact of these natural hazards. A return to the reliance on nuclear power to drive Japan towards net zero in energy within 30 years has to turn the negative experience of 2011 towards an increased safety and unique awareness of the impact and reduction of multiple coastal mega-hazards in the 21st century.

“This type of cascading hazard overwhelmed the response to the disaster.”

One of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world, Japan has in place a strict building code designed to withstand even the largest of events, and in 2011, few modern buildings built since the 1980s were destroyed.

The tsunami, however, exceeded even the tallest sea walls, contributing to the huge loss of life and the overwhelming of defences at the Fukushima plant. Across Japan, risks associated with natural hazards are subject to extensive research and prediction, and citizens and infrastructure are well-drilled in response to emergency warnings linked to earthquake threat. Ten years after the 2011 disaster, an earthquake of 7 magnitude and a succession of high magnitude aftershocks were recorded in a similar area to the 2011 event off the north-east Japan coast, taking out power supplies and impacting travel infrastructure but fortunately limiting injury and deaths. Well-planned disaster management procedures, earthquake preparedness drills and stringent building codes limited the extent of the damage and injury.

The records of past earthquakes and linked tsunamis are clear, and allow a more measured assessment of the risk of events in the future. Whilst earthquakes can’t be predicted with any certainty, the combination of an extensive geological record which informs the potential recurrence of major events, and Japan’s geography and geology,

Shimogō in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, August 2021. © Shino

34 Summer 2023

The Comrie Pioneers and the early study of earthquakes Christopher Palmer, voluntary custodian of the Earthquake House

This is a story about four people with enquiring minds who were at the forefront of the study of earthquakes; two church ministers, a postmaster and a shoemaker.

James Melville, who wrote in his diary that an earthquake was felt across Perthshire in July 1597, made the first recording of a local tremor.

Later, Reverend Ralph Taylor and Reverend Samuel Gilfillan documented a number of strange movements, noises and tremors in Comrie at the end of the 18th century. Reverend Taylor wrote an account of the earthquakes which was sent to the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE), whilst Reverend Gilfillan noted the times of occurrence of earthquakes in his journal for a period of 30 years.

This graphic account of an earthquake in 1789, written by Reverend Taylor, was read to the RSE by Reverend Professor Finlayson in 1790: “On the 10th November, at three o’clock pm, we had here another shock of much the same violence and extent as that on the 5th.

The mercury on the barometer of that day was more stationary than on the former, and at the time of the earthquake was 29 inches high. The weather was calm and hazy. It was market day at Comrie and the people, who were assembled from all parts of the country, felt as if the mountains were to tumble on their heads.

The hardware exposed for sale in the shops and booths shook and clattered, and the horses crowded together with signs of unusual terror.”

After a period of inactivity, further small shocks were felt until the ‘great earthquake’ of 23rd October 1839. There was significant damage locally, with houses suffering cracked walls and chimney pots thrown down. Tremors extended over most of Scotland and across the border with England. Twenty shocks occurred in the following 24 hours. An eyewitness wrote, “At Comrie, the consternation was such that people ran out of their houses, and, as late as was the hour, many assembled for prayer in the Secession Meeting House where religious exercises were continued until 3 o’clock in the morning.” This earthquake prompted Comrie postmaster Peter MacFarlane and shoemaker James Drummond to keep detailed records, and these early investigators became known as the Comrie Pioneers as they were at the forefront of studying the local earthquakes.

In 1840, the British Association for the Advancement of Science set up a committee to study earthquakes. Their work included devising and placing instruments in and around Comrie to record the earthquakes; committee chairman David Milne coined the word ‘seismometer’. An inverted pendulum

seismometer was designed and made for them in 1842 by Professor J D Forbes of Edinburgh. A different approach was tried, based on upright wooden ‘skittles’ arranged on cross boards designed by Robert Mallet, and a more sophisticated recording station which became known as the Earthquake House was built in a field belonging to Drumearn House in The Ross in 1874 to house the equipment. Unfortunately, the earthquake activity subsided and the Mallet seismometer never functioned.

By around 1900 the building fell into disrepair.

In 1977, the Earthquake House was designated a building of special architectural or historical interest, making it one of the smallest listed buildings in Britain. In 1986, Earthquake House was restored with windows installed in the front door and rear wall, allowing visitors to view both a replica of a Mallet seismometer and a modern Lennartz chart recorder which records earthquakes and tremors from across the world.

“Comrie lies a mile to the north of the Highland Boundary Fault.”

Up until the last century, scientists were unsure about the source of earthquakes. Were they geological or meteorological? Pioneer James Drummond the shoemaker believed they were the explosions of natural gas underground. As evidence accumulated, it became clear that they were the result of movement of great fractures in the Earth’s crust, called faults. There is resistance, so the two sides move in infrequent jolts, releasing built-up energy as earthquakes. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that the formulation of the theory of plate tectonics was offered.

Why is Comrie a centre for seismic activity? Comrie lies a mile to the north of the Highland Boundary Fault, which runs from Arran in the southwest to Stonehaven in the northeast, separating the hard PreCambrian and Cambrian metamorphic rocks of the Highlands from the Devonian and Carboniferous sedimentary rocks of the Midland Valley. This fault was highly active 400 million years ago when Strathearn, like much of Britain, was a hot dry desert, and one possibility is that the quakes felt in and around Comrie in recent history are just minor settling of this once great fault. The Highland Boundary Fault lies on the surface, just to the south of the town. It is thought that this may slope northward with depth. Alternatively, another unknown fault may exist at depth and be causing the shocks.

This theory is supported by many geologists on the basis that the Highland Boundary Fault is inactive elsewhere.

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Ralph Richardson’s Earthquake Map of Scotland Chris Fleet FRSGS, Map Curator, National Library of Scotland

Scotland’s first earthquake map was published in 1892, showing the main areas affected by each of the six largest earthquakes that had occurred in the last century. As its author, Ralph Richardson, makes clear, “Scotland has by no means an immunity from earthquakes. On the contrary…several earthquakes of considerable energy and affecting a wide area have periodically occurred.”

“Richardson’s data was effectively compiled from written accounts in journals.”

In an age before any comprehensive seismological recording, Richardson’s data was effectively compiled from written accounts in journals, along with various environmental details to identify patterns and causes – these included recent pressure and temperature changes, phase of the moon, time of day, and season in the year. The Richter scale was not developed until the 1930s, and so descriptions of intensity were more evocative; in Relugas in 1816, the “seismic sound resembled a great many pieces of heavy artillery driven furiously over a vaulted pavement.”

Geography would play a key role in understanding earthquakes.

Although Comrie on the Highland Boundary Fault (with its dashed line in red) was recognised as being the possible epicentre of the earthquakes of 1801 and 1839, Inverness, Edinburgh and Phladda [now Fladda] were considered the likely epicentres of the other earthquakes, but all with quite different geographic extents.

Ralph Richardson (1845–1933) worked as a lawyer in Edinburgh, but he was also a keen amateur geologist, co-founding the Edinburgh Geological Society in 1882, and serving as its first VicePresident. He was also very closely involved in RSGS, being present at the public meeting in October 1884 which launched the Society, and serving as its Honorary Secretary (1884–1923). He published widely on diverse subjects including banking and art, as well as on meteorology and geology, including The County of Edinburgh or Midlothian: Its Geology, Agriculture and Meteorology (1878) and The Influence of the Natural Features and Geology of Scotland on the Scottish People (1908).

Ralph Richardson / John Bartholomew & Co, ‘Earthquake Map of Scotland’ published in the Transactions of the Edinburgh Geological Society, vol 6 (1892). Image courtesy of the National Library of Scotland. View online at maps.nls.uk/view/242843779.

36 Summer 2023

Tower Ridge in winter Mike Pescod, Abacus Mountain Guides

After many years of climbing Tower Ridge, I’m convinced that it is a one ice axe route. Most of it is relatively straightforward and long sections of it are really quite simple. You might need two ice axes in certain snow conditions on the Great Tower, but you can always borrow your partner’s axe for that one move. This is the conclusion I’ve reached after many ascents in all sorts of conditions. But when I look back on my first ascent of Tower Ridge in winter, it’s an odd conclusion to come to.

Tower Ridge is a climb I had done in summer not too long before. It’s not hard and the route finding is quite simple on a relaxed, warm and dry summer’s day. In winter I had been climbing routes at harder grades than Tower Ridge and they had all gone well, including Point Five Gully. This is significantly harder but Point Five Gully is an ice climb, not a long, complex mountaineering objective.

So I was full of confidence as we walked in. We got to Douglas Gap fine, and up the awkward groove onto the crest of the ridge. The ridge looks completely different in winter and the best route is not always obvious. There was no trail to follow so I just followed my nose. Since we were climbing a ridge it made sense to stick to the crest of the ridge, so off I went.

thought I spied a way forward but not with just my one ice axe. I teetered back down, got my partner’s axe and carried on up the pitch with a good deal of swearing. It was certainly ground that required two ice axes. So after a few more, thankfully easier, pitches we got to a level section of the ridge.

Time wasn’t marching on as much as leapfrogging forward.

A check of the watch at one point would reassure me that we were doing OK. The next time I checked, the time had taken a great leap forward and we were well behind schedule. It seemed like we had done a significant amount of climbing already, so I convinced myself that we had climbed the Little Tower and the steep section ahead must be the Great Tower.

If this was right, the time of day was OK but there was still work to do.

At the top of what we thought was the Great Tower our hearts sank. Not only was the light starting to leave the mountain but what was obviously the Great Tower was standing high above us still. We found the Eastern Traverse, blindingly obvious when we got there, and successfully traversed along to the foot of the Fallen Block Chimney just as it was about to get dark. With all of my confidence from the start of the day chipped away by the relentless ridge, I suggested extending the Eastern Traverse and making our escape. I had heard of many enforced bivouacs at Tower Gap and I was determined not to make it another one. So we went across to the foot of Tower Gully and kept going to make the long descent of Observatory Gully and back home in the dark. My tail was firmly between my legs.

“At the top of what we thought was the Great Tower our hearts sank.”

After the first horizontal section the usual route in winter follows a snow ramp out right to avoid a steep section of the ridge, and up simple enough ground back onto the crest from the end of the ramp. If you follow the crest this steep section is quite tricky and draws you left up steepening grooves.

After a look up one of these and a bit of head scratching, I

Twenty-five years later and after a couple of hundred ascents of Tower Ridge in summer and winter, I now know the route intimately.

On a mountain rescue call-out recently I climbed the route in the dark, recognising each handhold and icy ledge so that I knew exactly where I was despite having zero visibility. So perhaps it is not surprising that I am happy to climb with one ice axe now. But my recommendation to anyone else would be to take two ice axes and make an early start. Tower Ridge is one of the finest mountaineering climbs in the country and is a sincere test of skill and judgement.

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38 Summer 2023

An interview with Richard Else Holly McNair, RSGS Communications Officer

What inspired your love of the outdoors?

I think it’s two or three things, and it’s hard to explain. My grandparents lived in Derbyshire, and I would go out with my grandfather on walks and see things in the hedgerows, and it just spoke to me. Going to the Lake District for the first time, and actually going up Great Gable and seeing the mist clear and the view down the valleys. I find that when you’re in wild and remote places, you have a different relationship with people. I went to Pakistan with Colin Prior, the photographer, and we spent weeks on the Baltoro Glacier. It was amazing having that experience of seeing K2, and the people we were with became our friends; you talk about their culture, they talk about yours.

wanted to be next to something that meant something very special to them. Somebody wanted to be outside a house that they had built themselves. That to me has always been important – to try and involve people. So you get a joint point of view, not just that of the filmmaker.

“It’s not just about the places you go; it’s about the people you meet and the stories you hear.”

What is your approach to filmmaking?

I have been lucky enough to visit a lot of amazing places. But it’s not just about the places you go; it’s about the people you meet and the stories you hear. For me it wasn’t about filmmaking and it still isn’t about filmmaking; it’s about meeting people. Whether Richard Else.

I’m photographing them, writing about them, or making films, it’s about human interaction. It’s the conversations you have and the people you are with, and filmmaking is just a way of communicating that.

I think the other thing is being respectful. I often say to people, “how would you like to be portrayed?” We did a project with tea farmers and we gave them cameras so that they could photograph their own lives, and the images that came back were astonishing. I also took portraits of them and asked, “how would you like to be seen?” Some people

Phortse village, Nepal.

What do you hope that people take away from your work?

When I do the RSGS Inspiring People talks, I will more or less do the same presentation in four or five different places and I always get entirely different questions at the end.

That to me is a great joy. It is great to see people bring their own experience and their own knowledge, but they will also take away a fact and we can aid understanding. I think a lot of what we see today tends to be quite superficial, but if you can engage people, encourage them to go away and think about something, to discover a bit more, then that is very special.

I found it astonishing when I went to Cappadocia, which I have been to a few times now. What I tried to say in my Inspiring People talk was, here is an area that is a tourist hotspot, you can go and have your balloon flight and champagne breakfast, if you don’t mind spending quite a lot of money. But you can walk ten miles out of this place where there are no proper maps, and you can meet people who are harvesting tomatoes in the field who want to talk to you.

As a filmmaker, it’s about sharing the wonders of the world that are all about us, and I think the more we understand, hopefully the more we will see a slightly better world that we have got now.

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Can you tell me about the Adventure Show?

How do you think adventure has changed?

to rebuild. Some areas like Langtang were totally devastated. The area where we were had significant damage. There wasn’t the loss of life that there was elsewhere, but still an incredibly traumatic experience. I think it’s astonishing how the people have pulled themselves together and rebuilt since that earthquake.

“Geography means everything about our place on this planet.”

We started the Adventure Show in 2005.

Since then, it seems there are far more people undertaking adventures who before would never dream of entering a triathlon.

There are many more people giving it a go, and the number of people who have walked up to us and said, “I blame the Adventure Show. I had no intention of doing this till I started watching the programme.” The people who run triathlon races are amazing, but the people who just take part are equally important. It is like a community of people, and you don’t need to be the best, you don’t need to be the fittest, you don’t need to spend lots of money. But there is that sense that the outdoors, and in different ways, can speak to all of us.

Can you tell me more about your time in Nepal?

We had a note from James Lamb, saying that he had started working with the Sherpa people in Phortse. After meeting James for a coffee, we decided to go out and film their story.

Anthropologists say Phortse is probably the most authentic Sherpa village. The story looked at how the Sherpa people live, and the fact that because there are very few employment opportunities they have to work as porters on Everest and how dangerous that really is. Also, the tensions this causes between men and women in the village, because a lot of expeditions have no insurance for Sherpa, so if they die, the family are left with nothing.

James was there when 16 Sherpas were killed on Everest, and he wanted to do something to help. Much to his own surprise, he met a monk called Tashi Lama, who’s now a great friend of us both, and they started a charity driven by the people of Phortse. There has been enormous generosity from people in Scotland, so now the village has running water, the school has been rebuilt, the clinic has reopened, and it’s great to see that. I’m actually going back in three weeks’ time to update the story.

What does geography mean to you?

What geography means to me is not dissimilar to what economics means to me. It’s about how we live our lives, and understanding how our lives can be more productive, how they can have less impact on the planet, and how we can have a better standard of living. I’m really interested in a whole range of academic subjects, and geography encompasses so much. So to me, geography means everything about our place on this planet. And that can be human geography, it can be economic geography, it can be physical geography. But they all come together to make us try and understand our world and ourselves better.

What do you hope to pass on to future generations?

I really hope we pass on a love of wild places, and that we need to work really hard to preserve them. I find nothing more inspiring than getting an email or a letter from somebody who says, “I’ve been suffering from depression, I haven’t been out of the house for a year, I watched your programme and it inspired me to go out and walk and take joy from being outside.” So passing on the environment is really important.

Richard Else is an award-winning filmmaker and photographer.

Is it true you were in Nepal when the earthquake hit?

Absolutely true – it was when we were leaving Nepal. I’d gone up the steps of the plane and just got my seat when there was an amazing movement, and I suddenly thought, are we moving? Has the pilot moved the plane ten yards without realising we’re still boarding? James Lamb was actually on the steps which separated from the plane. Once we were all on board, I received a text from my daughter who said, “I gather there’s been an earthquake,” and that was the first indication of what was happening. And because you can’t see a lot of Kathmandu from the airport, we had no idea how serious it was.

Tshering Lhamu.

Something quite extraordinary happened. All the staff from the airport, including air traffic control, just left, and the pilot, who was really competent and capable, was getting information from Delhi saying there would be an aftershock in two or three minutes. She took a decision, which I think is kind of unprecedented: after she’d walked up the runway to check there weren’t too many holes, we took off, and we were the only plane to leave for about four days. And I think in a way she made the right decision, because what could we have done that wouldn’t have been a burden to the people?

It was a very moving experience when we went back about four or five months later to see how people were starting

Ang Tshering.

All images © Richard Else

40 Summer 2023

Wild Isles: can a documentary reconnect us with lost nature?

Dr Phil Wheeler and Dr Miranda Dyson, School of Environment, Earth and Ecosystem Sciences, The Open University

March and April saw the release of the five-part BBC landmark documentary series Wild Isles. Billed as the first BBC series bringing the ‘blue chip’ production and camera work of the ‘Planet’ series to British and Irish wildlife, and narrated by Sir David Attenborough, Wild Isles showcased some of the spectacular and intriguing wildlife and landscapes that these islands support. It took viewers on a journey across Britain and Ireland, blending dramatic footage of rarely-seen events like orca hunting seals in Shetland with some of the most detailed close-up ‘macro’ footage of invertebrate lifecycles ever filmed. There were familiar species like robins foraging for worms alongside wild boar, and outlandish scenes such as the intricate nocturnal mating ritual of the ash black slug.

As OU academic consultants on the series, we had a unique insight into the production. The Open University (OU) has been in partnership with the BBC for over 50 years, coproducing series like Wild Isles, where we provide academic expertise throughout the production process, and produce free educational resources, such as posters, interactives and videos that feature in a ‘call to action’ before the closing credits. As well as creating the traditional OU poster, and an interactive online version (available at connect.open. ac.uk/wildisles), our role in Wild Isles involved early discussions with the production team about the series’ content and its conservation message, reviewing the early cuts of each episode, fact and sensechecking scripts and providing guidance where clarification was needed on parts of the narrative.

The selection of habitats, species and stories was largely in the hands of the producers and their camera team, which included some of the world’s best natural history film makers and some of the most Gannet, Bass Rock. © Simon King advanced filming equipment. The result was a series that prompted Sir David Attenborough to say, “In the British Isles, as well as astonishing scenery, there are extraordinary animal dramas and wildlife spectacles to match anything I have seen on my global travels.”

There has been enormous interest in Wild Isles: over seven and a half million people watched the opening episode, and around 250,000 OU posters have been ordered. Where some have criticised past BBC series for neglecting messaging about the climate or ecological crises, Wild Isles laid this context bare and remained honest to the current situation: nature in Britain and Ireland is wonderful, but, as the State of Nature reports (nbn.org.uk/stateofnature2019) have shown, it has been drastically diminished and continues to decline.

This wasn’t a series about nature conservation, but it did not shy away from conservation messages, and those messages were stark: precipitous declines in birds, insects, species-rich grasslands, hedgerows and ancient woodland; freshwaters

and marine habitats in poor condition. Nevertheless, the wildlife of Britain and Ireland was front and centre of the series, and this included many positive stories. These islands still support globally important numbers of many species, including migrant wading birds and geese, seals and seabirds. Notable tales of nature recovery were featured: capercaillie, the large blue butterfly, white-tailed eagle and beaver are species which have gone extinct but have been reintroduced with some success, showing that nature recovery in Britain and Ireland is possible.

Given that we are in a deepening ecological crisis, what positive effects might Wild Isles have? There is evidence that natural history programmes do increase public awareness: research based on web analytics shows that searches for species featured in these landmark series spike following the broadcasts. What is more, environmental issues aired in documentaries have measurable effects on public priorities.

The RSPB, WWF and National Trust have launched a number of activities building on the public interest in Wild Isles to drive conservation action. The series also provides a good opportunity to take stock of our relationship with nature. For people in Britain and Ireland over the past century, the tragedy of declines in nature hasn’t been so much the loss of rare species, but the disappearance of things that were once common and widespread.

The fabric of our natural heritage has been progressively picked apart, such that what was familiar and everyday is now unfamiliar and unusual. For example, birds like the lapwing and curlew whose calls would have been the sounds of spring in many places have declined in Scotland by 60% in just the last 25 years. As a result, we have lost much of our shared experience of nature. Perhaps Wild Isles will go some way towards reconnecting people in this country with our nature, and through nature with each other.

The challenge for all of us is to use this moment to work on tangible actions that will rebuild nature and our connection to it in a lasting and meaningful way.

FURTHER VIEWING & READING

Wild Isles is co-produced by Silverback Films, The Open University, RSPB and WWF, and is available to view in the UK on BBC iPlayer.

Kacprzyk J, Cune S, Clark C, Kane A (2023) Making a greener planet: nature documentaries promote plant awareness (Annals of Botany Vol 131, doi.org/10.1093/aob/ mcac149)

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“Environmental issues aired in documentaries have measurable effects on public priorities.”

Atlantic salmon, the Flow Country. © Richard Davies

Lapwing and chick, Outer Hebrides. © John Aitchison | Silverback Films | BBC

42 Summer 2023

Save Our Wild Isles James Reynolds, Head of Communications and Marketing (Scotland), RSPB; Addie Dinsmore, Head of Communications and Fundraising (Scotland), WWF If the recent BBC flagship natural history programme, Wild Isles, shows us anything, it is that the UK, and Scotland in particular, is globally important for wildlife.

Indeed, Sir David Attenborough himself states in the voiceover narration for the final episode, Saving Our Wild Isles, that, “The wildlife of Britain and Ireland rivals that of any place I have visited.” This is from the man who has presented from 333 locations during his TV career, in 83 different countries, including Fuxian Lake in China, Cape Royds in Antarctica, Pentecost Island in Vanuatu, and Meru National Park in Kenya. It’s quite the testament to the significance of what’s on our doorstep.

But whilst the programme presented so much to marvel at for the wildlife enthusiast and armchair naturalist alike, it also laid bare some stark, and rather more alarming, details.

The UK is also one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. Closer to home, Scotland sits 28th from the bottom in the Biodiversity Intactness Index, a global analysis used by the United Nations of how much human activity has impacted nature. Scotland is more depleted than 88% of 240 countries around the world. Of the 27 EU member states, 23 of them (85%) rank more highly than Scotland in biodiversity intactness.

uplands, helping to reduce wildlife crime and restore our peatlands and upland vegetation, locking up carbon to help meet our net zero ambitions. Currently in its first draft, it will hopefully become law later this year.

In the autumn we will see the first draft of the Agriculture Bill, which could transform how we support farming and food production in Scotland, restructuring the payments system we used to participate in as part of the EU Common Agricultural Policy to ensure it delivers for both nature and climate as well as sustainable food production.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Natural Environment Bill will be introduced next year. This will set legally binding nature recovery targets across land and sea, and establish an effective statutory target-setting, monitoring, enforcement and reporting framework, and contain the overarching goal of preventing any further extinction of wildlife and halting declines by 2030.

We are calling on all our elected representatives to do all they can to ensure that these three pieces of legislation deliver the maximum possible for nature. If they get it right, it will help to restore our biodiversity intactness and to Save Our Wild Isles.

It is one report among many. The 2019 State of Nature, a multi-partner and statutory agency report, which will be repeated this year, showed similar arresting facts: the abundance and distribution of Scotland’s species has on average declined over recent decades and most measures indicate this has continued in the most recent decade. There has been no slow-down in the net loss of nature in Scotland, and of course this is mirrored across the UK and all other countries of the world. The outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza which has ravaged our globally important populations of seabirds and wildfowl over the last 18 months is perhaps the most visible token of this onslaught.

But there is hope. It is within our power to change this, and restoring nature can have far-reaching benefits for our wild isles and for ourselves. We now have a few short years during which we can still make a choice; where just enough remains of the natural world for it to recover. This starts and ends with us, and it is why RSPB and WWF have teamed up to launch the Save Our Wild Isles campaign on the back of the remarkable documentary series.

Dry stream bed in mixed conifer forest, Abernethy RSPB reserve, Speyside. © Andy Hay (rspb-images.com)

Scotland, and the rest of the UK’s nature, is amazing. It is also our life-support system. But it is on the brink. Save Our Wild Isles is an urgent call to action to all of us to get involved and call for an immediate end to the destruction of our nature and urgent action for its recovery. It brings together people from all walks of life to reverse the harm we have done to nature and wildlife over the last two centuries.

Of course, as well as grassroots involvement, one of the best ways to bring about these urgent changes is through the legislative programme, and changes to policy that help nature. Right now, our representatives in Holyrood are in an especially important position, with three critical pieces of legislation coming before them which will go a long way to putting nature back on the right path.

The Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Bill offers a unique opportunity to reform the management of our

Loch a’ Chnuic, Abernethy RSPB reserve. © Andy Hay (rspb-images.com)

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“Restoring nature can have farreaching benefits.”

Wildflowers in machair grassland, RSPB Coll Nature Reserve. © Amy Millard (rspb-images.com)

44 Summer 2023

Frank Kingdon Ward: plant-hunting at the epicentre of the Assam–Tibet earthquake Jo Woolf FRSGS, RSGS Writer-in-Residence On the evening of 15th August 1950, as darkness fell over the Lohit valley in eastern Tibet, Frank Kingdon Ward and his wife, Jean, were relaxing in their tent. For five months they had been plant-hunting in the Mishmi Hills, which rise to heights of 16,000 feet and straddle the border between China and Assam in north-east India. On reaching the village of Rima, Frank and Jean had decided to camp overnight and then head off into the mountains, looking for new and exquisite alpine species.

It was only eight o’clock, but they intended to make an early start next morning and Jean had gone to bed. Frank was writing his diary by the light of a hurricane lamp. Two Sikkimese men, Akkey and Phag Tsering, whom they had hired as assistants, were in another tent close by. The night was cool and quiet, punctuated only by the shriek of an owl and the barking of dogs from the village.

Frank was dozing when the chair he was sitting in began to shake. Then he noticed that the table and the tent itself were shaking too. He got up and looked outside.

The mountains, which had been silhouetted against the starry sky, now looked strangely blurred. The shuddering became more violent, accompanied by a rumble that swelled to a roar. Jean woke up and leapt out of bed.

“Earthquake!” she shouted. Frank grabbed the lamp and they shot outside.

Assam–Tibet earthquake were detected by instruments as far away as California and South Africa. A seiche, or oscillating wave, was observed in Norwegian fjords and in reservoirs in the south of England, leading the Norwegian geologist Anders Kvale to coin the term ‘seismic seiche’ to describe this phenomenon.

But incredibly, when Frank Kingdon Ward checked the inside of his tent, the only visible damage was a glass of water that had been upset.

“The shuddering became more violent, accompanied by a rumble that swelled to a roar.”

The loss of human life could only be calculated much later. It is estimated that about 4,800 people died as a result of the earthquake or its after-effects, including landslides and catastrophic floods caused by rivers bursting through debris that had blocked them. Villages and monasteries were buried without trace.

Many thousands of people found themselves homeless and without food, having lost livestock and crops.

Not surprisingly, during the night after the earthquake, no one in Frank Kingdon Ward’s party could get to sleep. The ground still convulsed occasionally, and they feared that another quake might strike at any minute. A Frank Kingdon Ward. © RSGS Collections. cup of tea seemed like a good idea, but on The ground was bucking so much that it was finding that their water supply, a nearby stream, was fast impossible to stand up. Akkey and Phag Tsering crawled out drying up, there was a sudden panic to fill pans and kettles. of their tent, and in sheer terror they all lay flat and held each other’s hands, fully expecting the earth to split open and engulf them. The roar was excruciating; to Frank, it sounded “as though the keystone had fallen out of the universe and the arch of the sky were collapsing.” Then came another agonising noise, as entire mountainsides began to shear away. Avalanches of rock poured down around them. If they weren’t swallowed up, it seemed as if they would be buried alive.

The tumult continued for five long minutes. When the quaking began to subside, five deafening bangs were heard high in the sky, which reminded Frank of anti-aircraft shells exploding. As he rose unsteadily to his feet, he sensed that the worst was over. Miraculously, no one in his party was injured. Thick dust hung in the air, stinging their eyes and choking their lungs.

They peered over towards the village of Rima, which seemed eerily silent, and wondered if anyone had been lucky enough to survive.

Measuring 8.6 on the Richter scale, the 1950 Assam–Tibet earthquake is among the ten largest quakes ever recorded by seismograph, and the strongest ever recorded on land.

It is also the strongest recorded quake resulting from the collision, as opposed to the subduction, of continental plates.

In this case, the culprits were the Indian and Eurasian plates, whose spectacular slow-motion crumpling has thrown up the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau; their ongoing collision is notorious for sparking earthquakes throughout the region.

While Frank and Jean Kingdon Ward had unwittingly pitched their camp right over the epicentre, the shock waves of the

In the darkness, a local man arrived, smiling; he had walked from Rima, with news that no one in the village had died, but all the buildings were badly damaged. When daybreak came, Frank saw a procession of women filing out to work in the fields, and felt slightly reassured that some life, at least, was carrying on as normal. But the Lohit River was now “a wildlytossing sea of liquid mud,” and all the bridges had been swept away. Mentally dismissing all the alternative routes out of the valley, Frank realised that they were trapped.

It was three weeks before the local people could get a newlyplaited bamboo rope over the river. Frank, Jean, and several porters took turns to haul themselves across in a leather sling that dangled precariously over the torrent. By this time, having given away more than half their food supplies, they were living largely on rice. Now, as they climbed up into the mountains, they were forced to spend long days traversing steep hillsides where the old tracks had slipped away, leaving behind loose stones and the ever-present threat of avalanches.

Frank wrote: “At one spot opposite our camp, where the cliffs rose almost sheer from the river for 2,000 feet, a [rock] fall occurred regularly every half-hour. I have never watched a more terrifying sight. Immediately after the sharp crack of the rocks breaking loose came a crashing, grinding roar as they poured into the narrow chute, gaining speed. Then, toward the bottom, huge boulders leaped out to meet the river, spinning in the air as if fired from a gun, while the dust hung in clouds like smoke.”

The

45 Geographer14-

Summer 2023

At Walong, across the border in India, there was a wellprovisioned army outpost. Here, they waited for a month while tracks and bridges were repaired. Much of their equipment had to be left behind, but Frank, in defiance of the laws of nature, had been seed-collecting all along the route, sometimes climbing to heights of nearly 11,000 feet in his quest for alpines, and he refused to abandon his precious specimens. As they edged across crumbling slopes that dropped into valleys a thousand feet below, they passed porters coming the other way, loaded with food parcels for villages that had been cut off.

With the end almost in sight, the onset of the rainy season necessitated another wait at the Tidding River, whose raging waters had already demolished two replacement bridges.

On 4th November, nearly three months after their terrifying experience, Frank and Jean arrived in Sadiya on the Assam plain, where they learned the true extent of the earthquake and could communicate with anxious friends and family.

Mishmi porters crossing flooded streams. Reproduced with permission from Geographical Journal, Vol 121(3), September 1955.

Flying over the region in 1951, Frank reported that the earthquake had “affected more or less permanently a block of highly mountainous country which to west and south alone covers some 50,000 square miles, and to north and east probably no less.” River valleys had been gouged out to twice their former width; mountains of 15,000 feet had been “ripped to pieces and scraped clean,” while lower down, “strips of green pasture half a mile long had peeled off, leaving dead-white scars.”

Frank speculated about which plant species would first colonise the bare slopes – pines, he believed, and rhododendrons, along with birch, poplar and willow. To his botanist’s mind, the loss of vegetation was nothing short of catastrophic, but he comforted himself that “the climate is such as to encourage plant life from the start.”

Finding a track across a slip in the Lohit Valley.

Reproduced with permission from Geographical Journal, Vol 119(2), June 1953.

Shirui lily (Lilium macklinii), discovered by Kingdon Ward and named after his wife, Jean Macklin. © Devadarshan Gurumayum, via Wikimedia Commons.

“Frank had been seedcollecting all along the route, and he refused to abandon his precious specimens.”

Throughout his life, Frank Kingdon Ward made many planting-hunting trips to the Himalayas. He was awarded the Livingstone Medal in 1936 and gave several lectures to RSGS about his expeditions.

Lohit river. © Śantanū, via Wikimedia Commons.

FURTHER READING

F Kingdon Ward (1950) The Earthquake (Wide World Magazine) Snow-capped Mishmi Hills, seen from from Mayodia Pass. © Anu007bora, via Wikimedia Commons.

Jean Kingdon Ward (1952) My Hill So Strong

BOOK CLUB

46 Summer 2023

Moderate Becoming Good Later:

Plate Tectonics:

Sea Kayaking the Shipping Forecast

A Very Short Introduction

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After living with a rare life-limiting condition and facing the death of his brother, avid kayaker Toby Carr set out on a journey that took him to the harshest and most tranquil stretches of our sea.

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Closer to the Edge

Earth at Risk Natural Capital and the Quest for Sustainability Claude Henry and Laurence Tubiana (Columbia University Press, December 2017) We are squandering our planet’s natural capital (its biodiversity, water, soil, and energy sources) at a blistering pace. Major changes must be made to steer our planet and people away from our current, doomed course. Though technology has been one of the drivers of unsustainable development, it is also one of the essential tools for remedying it. The authors map out the necessary transition to sustainability, detailing the innovations in technology, law, science, institutional design, and economics that can and must be put to use to avert environmental catastrophe.

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Rutger Bregman (Bloomsbury Publishing, May 2020)

The 1960s revealed a new and revolutionary idea in geological thought: that the continents drift with respect to one another. Plate tectonics now explains much of the structure and phenomena we see today: how oceans form, widen, and disappear; why earthquakes and volcanoes are found in distinct zones which follow plate boundaries; how the great mountain ranges of the world were built. These processes continue: the Himalaya continues to grow, the Atlantic is widening, and new oceans are forming. Molnar provides a succinct and authoritative account of the nature and mechanisms of plate tectonics and its impact on our understanding of Earth.