Abstract
About a million earthquakes of magnitude 2 or more are registered each year worldwide. About a hundred of them cause serious damage and once or twice in a decade, a catastrophic earthquake occurs. The vulnerability of our world to earthquakes is rapidly growing due to well-known global trends: proliferation of high-risk construction, such as nuclear power plants, high dams, radioactive waste disposals, lifelines, etc.; deterioration of the ground and destabilization of engineering infrastructures in megacities; destabilization of the environment; population growth; and other factors, including the escalating socioeconomic volatility of the global village. Today a single earthquake with subsequent ripple effects may take up to a million of lives; cause material damage up to $1012; destroy a megacity; trigger a global economic depression (e.g. if it occurs in Tokyo); trigger ecological catastrophe rendering a large territory inhabitable; and destabilize the military balance in a region (e.g., the Middle East). Regions of low seismicity became highly vulnerable; among them are the European and Indian platforms and central and eastern United States. These regions harbor scores of vulnerable megacities such as New York, Moscow and Rome.
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© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Keilis-Borok, V.I. (2003). Fundamentals of Earthquake Prediction: Four Paradigms. In: Keilis-Borok, V.I., Soloviev, A.A. (eds) Nonlinear Dynamics of the Lithosphere and Earthquake Prediction. Springer Series in Synergetics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-05298-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-05298-3_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-07806-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-05298-3
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