Living in an age of catastrophic earthquakes

In recent years, a number of devastating quakes have struck across the globe in recent years — from Japan to Chile to Haiti — sparking fears that our planet is due to experience even more catastrophic temblors in the near future.

Three research teams have now combed through 110 years’ worth of global seismic records to see if we might be caught in a global trend of giant earthquakes.

One pair of researchers found clusters of what they called “megaquakes,” earthquakes of magnitude 9.0 or greater.

One cluster involved three such quakes between 1952 and 1964, including the magnitude 9.5 Chile quake of 1960, the largest earthquake ever recorded on Earth. Another, larger, cluster of magnitude 8.6 and higher temblors happened between 1950 to 1965, said Charles Bufe and David Perkins, seismologists with the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colo. They speculate that the magnitude 8.4 Peru quake in 2001 could mark the beginning of a new global sequence of major quakes that we are currently experiencing.

Bufe suggested that by sending seismic waves traveling around and around the planet’s surface, very large earthquakes might weaken fault zones that are already very close to failure. “I think there’s a more than 50 percent chance we’ll see another magnitude 9 quake sometime in the next decade or so,” he said.

Recently created earthquake intensity map

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