This article explores the dangers of building cities on geological faults, highlighting the devastating consequences of earthquakes in regions like Bam, Iran, and the recent tragedies in Turkey and Syria.
The shaking started just before dawn, right beneath the ancient Iranian city of Bam. Within moments, the magnitude 6.6 earthquake had torn the city apart. Bam was an archaeological treasure in a sea of empty desert and yet the quake seemed to strike it like a bullseye, says Cambridge geophysicist Professor James Jackson. A third of the city’s population died that day in 2003 – some 34,000 people – and most of its buildings crumbled to rubble, including the famous 2000-year-old citadel.
Jackson had come to Iran as a PhD student in the late 1970s to help lay early seismometers detecting quakes. When he returned to investigate the Bam disaster, he remembered that another Iranian oasis in the desert, Tabas, had been levelled by a quake not long after his drive across the desert. And there was another town, Sefidabeh, sandwiched between two deserts (one named the desert of death, the other the desert of hell) wiped out just four years before that. What was going on? The answer was in the earth – these settlements were all sitting on a “fault” in the rock. Faults let water pool, making a city in the desert possible, but they are also where the ground moves when something else rumbles out of its depths: an earthquake. Cities across the world are built on faults. Some nations, like Japan, are constantly thrumming with quakes. In Vanuatu, which straddles the infamous Ring of Fire quake hotspot of the Pacific, a 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck in the capital Port Villa on Tuesday. At least 14 people are dead and hundreds injured, including some trapped in the ruins of collapsed buildings and embassies.Other faults lie quiet for centuries, past disasters fading from memory until the next big one hits. “It’s like a time-bomb,” says Jackson. The earthquakes that shook Turkey and Syria in 2023 were even bigger than the Bam quake, killing almost 60,000 people, and also on a fault. In Australia, quakes are usually less powerful but surprisingly frequent
EARTHQUAKES FAULTS GEOLOGY CITIES DISASTERS
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