As the planet’s population becomes more urbanised and the number of people living in megacities in earthquake zones grows, the threat from seismic activity rises.
So far this century, earthquakes have taken 750,000 lives, and it’s only a matter of time before a single quake causes a million deaths.
Seismologists have been trying to predict earthquakes for more than 50 years and are no closer today. It would solve all our problems, however, if we could just stop them happening. One possible way of doing this would be to pump water into a fault so that it lubricated the fault plane, allowing it to move more easily and frequently. This would generate small, non-damaging quakes, rather than storing up all the strain for a ‘big one’. Fault lubrication is, however, largely untested and hit-and-miss. Stopping an earthquake in this way is clearly a long way off, and may never be feasible at all.
This story is from the May 2018 edition of BBC Earth.
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This story is from the May 2018 edition of BBC Earth.
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