These words will pertain to a fearsome force capable of devastating cities in minutes with little to no warning. Striking instantly and totally allowing no escape for the people caught in its range. No comrades, I am not referring to the awesome nuclear arsenal Russia possesses (though underground nuclear testing can set this force into action). I am talking about earthquakes, something I have already brought up in my in my first post and is directly related to tectonic plate activity. Surely many of the peoples of yore would have been terrified during a quake in part because they would have had little clues as to why or how their entire world was rocking violently and their settlements reduced to rubble. At times the earth opening up and or shifting significantly. Many would have attributed it to their deity(s) for lack of understanding and immensity of the event. Nowadays we do understand how and why earthquakes happen and have even developed systems to predict when they might occur or give us a slight warning when one does. Though we have a much better grasp on seismic activity it still is a frightening experience for the majority of people. 

Woe to the village that does not heed the lessons of the past and thinks not of preparing for a quake when they knowingly reside in a danger zone. Our text book talked about how places such as California are much more resilient to an earthquake because of the strict building codes meant to minimize damage when one occurs. A similar magnitude quake in California usually does a lot less damage than in a place where there are no such codes are put into place or they are seldom followed. This is partially why the Russian earthquake I mentioned in my first blog post was so deadly, along with the magnitude of the quake. The brunt of the quakes that are in or affect Russia are along its southern borders with other countries and along the one fault that runs through the country in the north east. The image at the top of this shows a number of quakes in this region quite well with a massive amount near Japan and along the Chinese/Mongolian border and the another cluster with the borders near the middle east and Eastern Europe. There is some quakes going on in the interior of Russia but a small amount compared to the areas I just mentioned. Interestingly some of the hot spots are not on fault lines, at least the major fault lines on all the maps that I have seen. Even the USGS interactive map does not acknowledge any fault on the southern Asian/Middle Eastern/Eastern European borders. Perhaps this is due to less known faults or just a lot of interplate activity.

Damage from a 5.9 quake in  Severo Kuril’sk

According to an article I read more than 20% of Russa is at risk of a 7.0 magnitude quake, 5% of which has the potential of experiencing 8.0-9.0 magnitudes. Another says that 50% of the country is at risk of experiencing some kind of quake. Considering how large Russia is this is a significant amount of territory. This is actually contrary to what I was expecting after last weeks study due to a lack of fault lines within Russia. Apparently, Russia has put into place stricter building guidelines to withstand the shaking of a quake. This a common thing for modern countries to do and it has been shown to be successful. 

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Sources

Eisenberg, J. M., and V. I. Smirnov. Development of Earthquake Protection Structural Systems Based on Response Control (2012): n. pag. 15 WCEE. Web.

Gonzales, Daria, and Rbth. "Earthquakes: Concerns in Russia's Seismically Active Regions." Russia Beyond. N.p., 30 May 2013. Web.

Keller, Edward A., Duane E. DeVecchio, and Robert H. Blodgett. Natural Hazards: Earth's Processes as Hazards, Disasters, and Catastrophes. N.p.: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016. Print.

Latest Earthquakes. USGS, n.d. Web.

Mutsvara, Shepherd. “5.9M Earthquake Shakes Russian Town · Guardian Liberty Voice.”Guardian Liberty Voice, 14 Oct. 2015, guardianlv.com/2015/10/5-9m-earthquake-shakes-russian-town/.

"Seismicity of Russia and the Former Soviet Union." U.S. Geological Survey. N.p., 2002. Web.