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There’s never been a more precise forecast of a giant earthquake, period. Our forecast is for an 8.8 magnitude earthquake in the next 30 years. Nobody can say whether it will be 30 seconds from now or 30 months. But we can say it’s very likely to happen within 30 years.
What are you going to do? Move the whole city for something that happens once every 200 years? That for me is the quintessential human predicament in regard to these very unlikely but very consequential events. The fundamental problem is not that scientists don’t know enough, and it’s not that engineers don’t engineer enough. The fundamental problem is that there are seven billion of us, and too many of us are living in places that are dangerous. We’ve built ourselves into situations where we simply can’t get away. And I think this will be a century of paying the consequences.
”Kerry Sieh, director of the Earth Observatory at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (via National Geographic article on tsunamis)
