Natural disasters like Nepal earthquake expose human frailty

Illustration: John Spooner.

We are still in the first stages of reacting to the earthquake in Nepal: shock, rescue, emergency relief efforts and overall damage assessment. An estimated  7000 people have been killed and millions left homeless. The Nepalese government has responded ineptly and there could well be political consequences from the fallout. But beyond the immediate response to the natural catastrophe, there is a lot to reflect upon and internalise concerning the significance of earthquakes and our place in the natural world.

One of the most important things is that we have, only in the past half century or so, developed a serious science of seismology and a capacity to understand the nature, anticipate the probability and estimate the severity of earthquakes. None of that seems to have helped in the case of Nepal, because of the incompetence of the Nepalese authorities, the poverty and inaccessibility of much of the country. There were, apparently, some warnings, but no serious measures were put in place to prepare for what happened.

Earthquakes … are wholly natural phenomena, caused by characteristics of the physical world which were not designed for our ease and comfort; or, indeed, ‘designed’ at all.

There are other places in the world where the same kind of thing could happen with even more devastating consequences. Tehran, for example, is a crowded, jerry-built city at serious risk from a catastrophic earthquake. It can be calculated with some confidence that there will be an earthquake at 7.0 or above on the Richter scale under Tehran every 300 years. It has not had one for as long as records have been kept, so we do not know where we sit in the 300-year time band. But should such a quake hit Tehran it would almost certainly kill huge numbers of people, because the city is vast and has not been designed to withstand a serious earthquake.

Residents clear the rubble from their homes which were destroyed after last week’s earthquake in Bhaktapur, Nepal. Photo: Reuters

Seismology did not begin as a science until after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and even then it took 200 years before it began to mature as a science. That quake was about 9.0 on the Richter scale, far bigger than the recent one in Nepal. It killed an unknown number of people (estimates range from 10,000 to 100,000) because it not only demolished the Portuguese capital of Lisbon and its surrounds, but generated tsunamis that hit lands on both sides of the Atlantic and are thought to have killed large numbers of people on the coasts of Morocco.

There was a great deal of speculation after the Lisbon earthquake regarding what it “signified”. Theologians urged that it was a manifestation of the wrath of the Christian God. A number of more sceptical individuals pointed out that this seemed improbable, if only because the Alfama, the city’s  renowned red-light district, had been one of the few parts of Lisbon to pretty much pass unscathed. The philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote the first theses on the possible natural causes of earthquakes, showing, as in so much of his work, both striking originality and considerable perceptiveness.

Voltaire was inspired to write his novel Candide; a picaresque reflection on the nature of the world and the human condition, but he was well short of being able to offer a science of the natural world or of the human condition within it. All that had to wait until the 20th century and even the last decades of the 20th century.

The key to earthquakes, it transpired, was continental drift and plate tectonics. The theory of continental drift was first conceived in 1911 by Alfred Wegener but was rejected for the next 50 or 60 years by the scientific world.

Only in the past half-century has continental drift been acknowledged as a reality. We now know that the Indian subcontinent was once an island land mass, which has drifted northward over millions of years, colliding with the Eurasian landmass long before human beings emerged out of the primate past and pushing masses of rock upward to form the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau. That inexorable geological force is the cause of the recent earthquake in Nepal.

This scientific breakthrough has gone along with revolutions in probability theory, the theory of complex systems and many other sciences to provide us with a better understanding of the natural world and our place within it than any earlier human culture or civilisation. It was in 1944, for instance, that Charles Richter​ and Beno Gutenberg​, at Caltech, established that there is a straightforward power law relationship between the frequency and magnitude of earthquakes: the frequency decreases exponentially with the magnitude.

This makes good forecasting, but not precise prediction, possible – rather as in meteorology. Fukushima was such a disaster because the nuclear plant was built to withstand an earthquake up to 8.0 on the Richter scale; nothing bigger being thought credible. What occurred was a 9.1 quake. The power law could have warned the designers, but they overlooked or ignored it. We suffer irregular economic and geo-political “earthquakes” for much the same reason.

The most general lesson from all this is that earthquakes have nothing whatsoever to do with deities of any kind. They are wholly natural phenomena, caused by characteristics of the physical world that were not designed for our ease and comfort; or, indeed, “designed” at all. We can, with good science and sound governance, take precautions against them. The same holds true for a wide range of natural and social phenomena in a complex world. Alas, far too many of us still fail to understand the world in a naturalistic and probabilistic way. As for governance – well, that calls for a lot of work, locally and globally.

Dr Paul Monk is an author, former senior intelligence analyst and commentator on public and international affairs. His forthcoming book, Opinions and Reflections: A Free Mind at Work 1990-2015, will be published this winter.

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