A smarty pants television anchor dedicates an entire show to how earthquakes and climate change are linked, going on for a full hour on how melting glaciers impact the geology of their area and can trigger earthquakes. A reasonably large religious newspaper publishes an advertisement by a group on the United Nations list of banned organisations, which also carries on large-scale relief work in disaster-hit areas, that repeated earthquakes in Pakistan are the result of God’s displeasure with people’s habits.

On another TV channel, on the day of the quake itself, an anchor announces “we have to cut to break now, but when we return we will ask a religious scholar a very important question: how do earthquakes occur?” Two stops away, another anchor on another channel announces “there is a religious dimension to all this”, then turns and asks his guest — a big name leading a large congregation — “what can people do to prepare themselves for natural disasters?”

Let’s admit up front that these are important questions. The relationship between climate change and earthquakes may not be a causal one, as the smarty pants anchor tried to loop himself into arguing, but there is a connection in that both phenomena pose grave challenges to Pakistan. Asking why earthquakes are happening with such frequency in our country is also a good question, as well as asking how they occur in the first place. It’s also a good idea to ask what can be done by way of disaster preparedness in the future.

The problem is in the loopy causal links that are drawn. Consider for a moment the argument that natural disasters are the expression of God’s displeasure. If this is true then the reverse must also hold true: that natural bounties and endowments and good weather are evidence of God’s pleasure with how things are going. So if the people are leading lives that displease God, why is it that nature smiles down upon us one day but frowns the next?

The congregation leader answered his question by saying that people should endeavour to become more pious to prevent further earthquakes. But then why is it that many places, where people are demonstrably not very pious at all, like Las Vegas for instance, are hardly ever inconvenienced by natural disasters?

The problem in Pakistan is this: we are threatened in very significant ways by natural phenomena — whether seismic or climatic — yet we have hardly any scientific community worth its name that can at least follow the discussions taking place in the global scientific community about these threats and translate them into a simple language for us to understand.

If we had such a scientific community, the first thing they would do is to tell us what the latest findings of seismologists who study our region are. They would find that there are a number of people who have done detailed work on seismic hazard in north India, including Pakistan. Some are located at the University of Colorado and another set at Stanford University. The work they have done is based on ground measurements, and they both arrived at the same conclusion.

North India, in an arc running from Kashmir all the way to Myanmar, is sitting on a zone where a magnitude 9 earthquake could occur, if all of the energy accumulated along its shallower fault lines were to be released in one go. “Were the segment of the Himalayas between the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, and the Mw7.8 Kangra earthquake to slip 20 metres in a single earthquake, it could do so in a Mw=9,” said Roger Bilham, one of the seismologists from Colorado, who has based his findings on detailed geodetic measurements taken within Pakistan and India. He said this in a presentation in 2011, and then added this sentence: “No earthquake of this severity is known”.

At the same event where Bilham presented his findings, another seismologist who specialises in studying surface ruptures in mega earthquakes, also spoke. At the end, the first question he was asked was whether he believed an M9 earthquake in the Himalayas was possible. His answer was ‘yes’. Then he described what could happen in that sort of an event. These were his words:

“The zone likely to rupture when a quake eventually happens could be 200 kilometres wide, rather than about 80km, as was previously thought. The zone would encompass the Kashmir Valley — including the city of Srinagar, home to some 1.5 million people. If slippage occurs over a length of 300km, as is possible, a mega quake of magnitude 9 is the likely result. Given building codes and population in the region, that could mean a death toll of 300,000 people. What Bilham can’t predict from his GPS results is when such a disaster might happen.”

This is a truly horrific scenario, but we can take some comfort from the thought that even though it is theoretically possible, it is still the most unlikely of the various scenarios arising from the massive build-up of energy under the Himalayas due to the tectonic collision between the Indian and the Eurasian plates.

Meaning it’s not all doom and gloom. At the very extreme, we could be struck by a catastrophic earthquake, but more likely is a series of large quakes, the kinds that kill in the tens of thousands rather than the millions. What is also comforting to note is that facing an earthquake is a lot simpler than facing other natural disasters like climate change that present us with a variegated set of challenges.

The quackery needs to end. Natural disasters are visiting us with growing regularity, and growing ferocity, and there are clear scientific answers as to why this is happening. There are also clear policy responses to make ourselves better prepared. It’s not too late to start working on preparedness for the next big disaster, whenever it comes.

The writer is a member of staff.

khurram.husain@gmail.com

Twitter: @khurramhusain

Published in Dawn, October 29th, 2015

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