Earthquakes kill, on average, about 20,000 people every year.
When a quake strikes, there's very little time to prepare, and survival has a lot to do with luck: Building codes , the time of day, and even the weather (which can trigger avalanches and mudslides) can play a role in how much destruction an earthquake causes.
It has generally been tough to determine where in the world people are most at risk, since there was no standardized, comprehensive way to compare the consequences of shaking around the world.
But now, anew mapping project led by the Global Earthquake Model Foundation (GEM) has done just that.
"No one's ever created a global earthquake risk map at this level of detail before, and certainly not for the public," GEM Secretary General John Schneider told Business Insider.
GEM scientists pinpointed which parts of the world are most at risk of earthquakes and where people can expect these disasters to do the most damage. They factored in the latest earthquake science, like ground-shake potential, as well as the human element: how exposed and vulnerable people are to earthquakes in different areas of the world. They took into account how fragile people's homes, schools and workplaces are; how densely populated earthquake-prone regions are; and, to some extent, what previous fatality numbers have been. The effort included hundreds of collaborators from public, private, and academic institutions around the world who worked together on what's now an open-source collection of maps .
"This allows one to get much more detailed information about the types of buildings, the population density, the potential for fatalities, the potential for damage, and economic loss essentially anywhere in the world," Schneider said.
After working on the maps for many years, the scientists realized that 15 countries account for most of the death and destruction wrought by earthquakes. They calculated that quakes cost us about $93.7 million globally, when expenses are normalized on a per-meter-squared basis (the researchers accounted for differences in construction costs across countries ).
Of that $93.7 million, the following 15 countries rack up nearly all the damage: more than $71.5 million, the researchers estimate.Here's who's most at risk of a coming quake, according to the experts, in order from highest potential for loss to lowest.
Harrison Jacobs/Business Insider
"Whether it's over the last 50 years or the last 500 years, they've had half the deaths," Schneider said.
It's cheaper to rebuild after an earthquake in China than it is in nearby Japan, but with more than 1.3 billion people in the country, the potential for loss of life and property is huge. One of the most brutal Chinese earthquakes in recent memory, the 7.5-magnitude quake that hit Tangshan in 1976, killed 242,769 people.
The new GEM maps give the public an unprecedented way to see detailed, local data on Chinese earthquake risks. GEM's global seismic risk map , for example, allows viewers to zero in on average annual economic losses around different cities and towns, and it's normalized to account for differences in construction costs.
REUTERS/Kyodo
Japan debuted a system in 2007 that detects early shock waves via a network of more than 1,000 seismometers around the island nation. The system then pings phones, TVs, and radios across the country, stopping trains and providing people with a few extra seconds to prepare for the tremors.
That time isn't always enough, though. A quake that hit the northern island of Hokkaido in September killed at least 39 people, as CNN reported .
That 6.7 magnitude tremor was far from the worst the Japanese have seen. A 7.9 quake hit Tokyo in 1923, killing 142,807 people.
REUTERS/Tasnim News Agency
A magnitude-7.3 earthquake that hit the country in 2017 killed more than 400 people . Rescue workers scrambled into action, but mudslides triggered by the quake made their work difficult.
People as far as Baghdad, 200 miles from the epicenter in Iraq, felt the shaking.
"I was sitting with my kids having dinner and suddenly the building was just dancing in the air," Majida Ameer told Reuters at the time. "I thought at first that it was a huge bomb. But then I heard everyone around me screaming, 'earthquake!'"
The Iranian capital of Tehran, which sits near the base of the countrys highest peak, Mount Damavand, is the area of the country that's most at risk.
NOEL CELIS/AFP/Getty Images
The Ring of Fire sits above a crowd of tectonic plates in the ocean. Where the plates meet, older, denser parts of the seafloor get pushed below continental crust . Such areas are called subduction zones.
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Both Indonesia and the Philippines are essentially surrounded by the majority of Earth's subduction zones, making their spot in the ocean a volatile breeding ground for volcanoes and frequent quakes.
Flickr/Moyan Brenn
The head of Istanbul's Kandilli Observatory warns that the city which is home to more than 14 million residents and the surrounding Marmara Region are due for a serious quake.
"All scientists accept that there will be an earthquake with a magnitude stronger than 7 around the Marmara region but we cannot give a date for it," Haluk zener told Turkish media at a press conference in 2017 . "There have been many earthquakes so far and there will be more. The only thing that can be done is to reduce earthquake damage."
But many buildings in the area are at risk of crumbling in a big shake.During the Marmara earthquake that hit the region in 1999, 18,000 people died and 113,000 buildings were destroyed.
Today, the Istanbul office of the Union of Architects and Engineers of Turkey says 2 million buildings in the city are perilously "unsafe."
Amit Dave/Reuters
The area around Delhi sits near the border of the Indian tectonic plate, which brings a high level of risk.
There are also many brick buildings in the country, which can easily crumble and crush people inside.
"Brick buildings dominate the damage and life lost due to earthquakes," Schneider said.
The average annual cost of earthquakes in Delhi alone tops $150 million USD, according to GEM .
RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP/Getty Images
Earthquakes occur anytime these plates grind or butt up against each other.
Mexico City is also located in a former lake-bed whose soft soil can essentially amplify tremors in the area. That makes small earthquakes feel larger.
Mexico City was hit by an 8.1 magnitude quake in 1985, and about 9,500 people died as a result.
According to GEM , the Baja California region of Mexico which borders California is the part of the country that's most at risk.
Donald Miralle/Getty Images for LUMIX
The new GEM maps are being used around the world to enact better building codes. But Schneider said that doesn't mean that traditional building practices, which often involve bricks and adobe mud, need to be replaced with reinforced steel and concrete.
"You can build safe buildings using brick and mortar," Schneider said.
This can involve wrapping a fine steel mesh around older Nepalese buildings to create reinforcement.
"They don't necessarily just throw away their traditional design, but they learn to adapt," Schneider added.
Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
The 7.6-magnitude quake struck the town of Muzaffarabad in the mountains of Kashmir.
Pakistan sits atop both the Indian and Eurasian plates, which is why it sees frequent shaking. Northern areas of the country, where the land is dotted with high-altitude towns like Muzaffarabad, are the most at risk.
A.M. Ahad/AP
The study suggested that the region could be on top of an active megathrust fault like the one that caused the 9.0 magnitude earthquake in Japan in 2011.
Scientists say at least 140 million people in Bangladesh could be affected in the event of a big earthquake. Geologists have little historical data from the area to use in predictions about such a quake, but they expect it could be huge when it happens: a magnitude 8.2 or bigger.
"We dont know how long it will take to build up steam, because we dont know how long it was since the last one,"Michael Steckler, a geophysicist at Columbia UniversitysLamont-Doherty Earth Observatory said when his study was released in Nature Geoscience . "We cant say its imminent or another 500 years. But we can definitely see it building."
The subduction zone that could cause the earthquake is located under the Ganges-Brahmaputra river delta the world's largest. Geologists said it's possible that an earthquake would turn the entire area into quicksand.
REUTERS/Henry Romero
Ecuador's most populous region, the Guayas province, is also the one at greatest risk of an earthquake. Guayas is home to about 3 million people.
About 5,000 people died in 1987, when a 7.2 magnitude earthquake hit Quito, Ecuador's capital. And in 1949, 6,000 people died due to a 6.8 magnitude quake that struck Ambato in central Ecuador.
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The countrys Guatemala region which includes Guatemala City is the area most at risk of an earthquake, according to GEM . A 6.2 magnitude quake killed 25 people in Guatemala City in 1991.
In 2012, 48 people died when San Marcos, which is in western Guatemala, was hit by a 7.3-magnitude quake.
Robert Galbraith/Reuters
San Francisco is constantly at risk of earthquakes . The well-known San Andreas Fault is one of seven "significant fault zones" in the Bay Area, according to the US Geological Survey . In 1989, the 6.9-magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake rocked the Bay Area and resulted in 62 deaths. The city may be due for another big shake soon.
One recent report suggests there is a 76% chance that the Bay Area will be hit by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake within the next 30 years.
Outside of California, the Seattle area is the most at-risk earthquake spot in the US.If the entire Cascadia subduction zone which spans 700 miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest were to give way at the same time, the resulting earthquake could have a magnitude between 8.7 and 9.2.
According to The New Yorker , officials estimate that nearly 13,000 people would die in a Cascadia earthquake and tsunami event. The chance of this happening in the next five decades is one in three.
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The 7.9 magnitude quake struck Pisco, a coastal city in western Peru.
According to GEM , the region surrounding Lima, Perus capital, is the part of the country at greatest risk of earthquakes. The Arequipa region in southern Peru is the next-most vulnerable.
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