James Jackson on the Fatal Attraction Between Cities and Earthquakes
James Jackson is professor of active tectonics at Cambridge University. He uses earthquakes, geomorphology, accurate satellite surveys, and remote sensing to examine how continents are deforming today on all scales: from the details of the fault rupture in single earthquakes, to how that faulting has created the local geomorphology and structure, to how regional fault patterns and motions can deform vast continental areas. He addresses problems in structural geology and tectonics by focusing on places that are active now, rather than on older, inactive basins and mountain belts.
In the photo he is at the Arg-e-Bam, an ancient citadel in southeastern Iran a few years after a 2003 earthquake that killed 30,000.
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Podcast Illustrations
All illustrations courtesy of James Jackson
The world distribution of earthquakes. Each earthquake indicates an active fault. The faults occur in narrow bands in and on the edge of the oceans and are dispersed throughout the Alpine-Himalayan belt.
The distribution of earthquakes in Asia indicating a complex network of active faults.
Earthquakes that killed more than 10,000 people in the last 1000 years.
Earthquakes that killed more than 10,000 people from 1000 to 2008 AD with trade routes.
Histogram showing the number of earthquakes for each century of the last millennium that killed more than ten thousand people.