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- Earthquakes kill roughly 20,000 people each year, on average.
- A new global mapping project shows which regions of the world are most at risk of earthquakes.
- 15 countries account for most of the death and destruction caused by quakes.
Earthquakes kill, on average, about 20,000 people every year.
When a quake strikes, there's very little time to prepare, and survival has a lot to do with luck: Building codes, the time of day, and even the weather (which can trigger avalanches and mudslides) can play a role in how much destruction an earthquake causes.
It has generally been tough to determine where in the world people are most at risk, since there was no standardized, comprehensive way to compare the consequences of shaking around the world.
But now, a new mapping project led by the Global Earthquake Model Foundation (GEM) has done just that.
"No one's ever created a global earthquake risk map at this level of detail before, and certainly not for the public," GEM Secretary General John Schneider told Business Insider.
GEM scientists pinpointed which parts of the world are most at risk of earthquakes and where people can expect these disasters to do the most damage. They factored in the latest earthquake science, like ground-shake potential, as well as the human element: how exposed and vulnerable people are to earthquakes in different areas of the world. They took into account how fragile people's homes, schools and workplaces are; how densely populated earthquake-prone regions are; and, to some extent, what previous fatality numbers have been. The effort included hundreds of collaborators from public, private, and academic institutions around the world who worked together on what's now an open-source collection of maps.
"This allows one to get much more detailed information about the types of buildings, the population density, the potential for fatalities, the potential for damage, and economic loss essentially anywhere in the world," Schneider said.
After working on the maps for many years, the scientists realized that 15 countries account for most of the death and destruction wrought by earthquakes. They calculated that quakes cost us about $93.7 million globally, when expenses are normalized on a per-meter-squared basis (the researchers accounted for differences in construction costs across countries ).
Of that $93.7 million, the following 15 countries rack up nearly all the damage: more than $71.5 million, the researchers estimate. Here's who's most at risk of a coming quake, according to the experts, in order from highest potential for loss to lowest.
SEE ALSO: Why San Francisco is a nightmare, according to science
China, a seismically active country with the world's largest population, accounts for roughly half of all earthquake deaths.
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"Whether it's over the last 50 years or the last 500 years, they've had half the deaths," Schneider said.
It's cheaper to rebuild after an earthquake in China than it is in nearby Japan, but with more than 1.3 billion people in the country, the potential for loss of life and property is huge. One of the most brutal Chinese earthquakes in recent memory, the 7.5-magnitude quake that hit Tangshan in 1976, killed 242,769 people.
The new GEM maps give the public an unprecedented way to see detailed, local data on Chinese earthquake risks. GEM's global seismic risk map, for example, allows viewers to zero in on average annual economic losses around different cities and towns, and it's normalized to account for differences in construction costs.
Japan sits in one of the most active earthquake zones on the planet: the Pacific Ring of Fire. Fortunately, earthquake-warning systems in the country are second to none.
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Japan debuted a system in 2007 that detects early shock waves via a network of more than 1,000 seismometers around the island nation. The system then pings phones, TVs, and radios across the country, stopping trains and providing people with a few extra seconds to prepare for the tremors.
That time isn't always enough, though. A quake that hit the northern island of Hokkaido in September killed at least 39 people, as CNN reported.
That 6.7 magnitude tremor was far from the worst the Japanese have seen. A 7.9 quake hit Tokyo in 1923, killing 142,807 people.
Iran straddles the spot where the Eurasian and Arabian tectonic plates butt heads, which is why it sees such frequent quakes.
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A magnitude-7.3 earthquake that hit the country in 2017 killed more than 400 people. Rescue workers scrambled into action, but mudslides triggered by the quake made their work difficult.
People as far as Baghdad, 200 miles from the epicenter in Iraq, felt the shaking.
"I was sitting with my kids having dinner and suddenly the building was just dancing in the air," Majida Ameer told Reuters at the time. "I thought at first that it was a huge bomb. But then I heard everyone around me screaming, 'earthquake!'"
The Iranian capital of Tehran, which sits near the base of the country’s highest peak, Mount Damavand, is the area of the country that's most at risk.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
