A new five-year study is to target a relatively neglected area of earthquake research – the ten million square kilometres of the Alpine-Himalayan belt stretching from Italy, Greece and Turkey, across the Middle East, Iran and central Asia, to China. Earthquakes in continental interiors such as these lead to significantly more deaths than on the better-studied oceanic plate boundaries because they often take place on unknown faults.
The £3.5 million ‘Earthquakes without frontiers’ project will not only pinpoint faults in the Earth’s crust but also understand the vulnerabilities of communities at risk, and communicate this new knowledge to policy makers. Led by the University of Cambridge, the study involves physical and social scientists from six UK universities and four institutes and organisations, together with collaborators in some of the most earthquake-prone regions of the world.
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Image Bam, southeastern Iran, after the 2003 earthquake Credit: James Jackson
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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