Discussion»Questions»Environment» Earthquakes hit. They are localized. The damage is contained. Hurricanes travel. Are hurricanes the most deadly environmental disaster?
To compare "deadliness" you'd have to compare death rates. Otherwise, hurricanes are generally more devastating than earthquakes for the reason you give, irrespective of mortalities.
I think the greatest death-toll from earthquakes other than ones demolishing cities, occurs when the tremor's epicentre is on the sea-bed and throws up a powerful tsunami, which can travel long distances and rapidly inundate extensive areas of low-lying coasts.
(The Epicentre is the centre of maximum movement on the land surface or sea-floor above the Focus - which is the centre of the actual slip whose vibrations are the tremors.)
Of course we have our infamous San Andreas Fault in California along with a few other faults. We have been told that "the big one" could hit any time. We have been hearing that for years! We live well inland about 70 miles from the Pacific Ocean so I'm sure the water from a Tsunami could not reach us here. In other countries earthquakes have been devastatingly disastrous. Maybe because they don't have the same building codes we do? Thank you for your thoughtful and informative reply Durdle. We have earthquakes and fires (because of our lack of rain things get really dry) in California. What harmful natural phenomena do you experience where you live? Everyplace has something not-so-hot environmentally speaking I guess.
This post was edited by RosieG at September 15, 2017 2:00 AM MDT
As it happened I heard something on the radio about this, after the above conversation. It pointed out that powerful earthquakes kill more people than hurricanes, because they occur very rapidly and demolish so many buildings before anyone can escape. A hurricane builds up over time, so those in its path have chance to escape or to seek suitable shelter.
Tsunamis don't normally travel far inland, due to the ground rising inland and to the ground itself and everything on it absorbing the force - though being wrecked in the process. I understand one of the best tsunami-breakers is all natural: a mangrove swamp.
I have a pen-friend in Norway who told me they suffered from forest- and grass- fires at an unexpected time of year: the previous Winter! The weather had been a very unusual drought, and when power-lines broke under the weight of ice building up on them, the sparking on the dry vegetation before the power was cut, set it alight.
The British Isles' main natural hazards are floods and storms, though on nothing like the scale suffered by the sub-tropical areas of the Americas. Being an island with parts of the coast open to the Atlantic, storm-wave damage is fairly common, but most of the floods are along rivers.
I was surprised to read somewhere that Britain also has very many cyclones, but ones powerful enough and long-lived enough to do any harm are extremely rare.
We do have earthquakes, in fact one or two areas of the country wobble like a jelly, relatively speaking; but luckily most are very minor, causing little or no damage. I don't know their cause but surmise a combination of pressure from the West as the Atlantic widens, plus perhaps lingering traces of what is called "isostatic rebound", of the Continental Crust gradually springing back by its own elasticity as the last glaciation's ice-sheets thawed about 8-12 000 years ago. The weight of ice from the English Midlands northwards would have depressed the Crust, and the effect now is that NW Scotland is still rising while SE England is subsiding, very slightly.
The massive earthquakes afflicting the Western US states and parts of Asia, are the shocks from slabs of the Pacific Ocean floor crust being subducted (forced down) below the continents. The 'quakes are the vibrations from the sudden slips, as the friction is so great that progress is a huge stick-slip motion.
Durdle 