‘Expect more disasters like Palu’: why giant quakes continue to devastate poorer Asian communities
Former Caltech professor Kerry Sieh expects an even larger one to devastate the archipelago in the next 15 to 20 years. Better education and safety measures could save more lives
The magnitude-7.5 earthquake and tsunami that hit the Indonesian island of Sulawesi two weeks ago has left more than 2,000 people dead as of Tuesday and the possibility that as many as 5,000 victims have yet to be found, most of them buried in mudflows.
This tragedy is likely to repeat itself, for the archipelago is a hotbed of seismic activity. In the words of one of the world’s leading geologists, Kerry Sieh, Indonesia can “expect more of the same, to be perfectly cynical”.
In particular, Sieh, the director of the Earth Observatory at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, has forecast Indonesia’s Sumatra island will be hit by a giant magnitude-9 earthquake in the next 15 to 20 years.
In geology, the places where the earth’s crust has fractured due to the shifting of tectonic plates are known as “faults”, and a 5,500km-long fault called the Sunda megathrust lies to the west of Sumatra – one of Indonesia’s five main islands.
Since the 1990s, Sieh has used corals to build a record of earthquakes in the area over the past 1,000 years, and his research shows major quakes occur every 230 years.
“They happen in clusters. So there will be nothing happening for 200 years, and then pop, pop, pop – two or three or more big earthquakes,” Sieh said.