o factor in the nature of the deep crust."1
About 15 percent of all earthquakes occur in the Eurasian earthquake zone, which stretches in an east-west direction from Indonesia to the Mediterranean Sea region, and includes China, Iran, India and the Middle East. One of the two continental plates in this area is moving northward at the rate of two inches a year. It has been estimated that more than 13,000,000 Chinese have been killed in earthquakes. Earthquakes have occurred around the world: in 1988, a devastating earthquake struck Armenia in the Soviet Union, killing an estimated 25,000 people; in September 1985, Mexico City was rocked by an earthquake that killed more than 10,000 people and destroyed nearly 1,000 buildings; In 1976, more than 655,000 people were killed in Tangshan, China, after an earthquake struck; in May 1970, an earthquake triggered a landslide that buried an entire village in Chimbote, Peru, and killed more than 70,000 people; and in Tokyo, Japan, the earthquake of 1923 is commemorated in memory of the 143,000 lives lost to titanic ocean waves, and fires. To these must be added earthquakes in Kansu Province, China, where 10 cities were destroyed and more than 200,000 lives lost (1920); the Sanku coast of Japan, where waves rose to more than 115 feet (1896); Charleston, South Carolina (1986); and, as early as 1556, when the _______________________________________________________
1Richard A. Kerr, "A Fall Harvest of Earth Science in San Francisco," Science, 3 January 1992, 30.
worst natural disaster of all time occurred during an earthquake that
took the lives of an estimated 830,000 people. The most famous Alaska earthquake is the Good Friday disaster of 1964. That temblor centered on the Denali Fault near Anchorage and Valdez. In less than a minute, Anchorage had become rubble. Its main street was transformed into a series of cliffs, and an ensuing tsunami, traveling at more than 200 miles an hour, c...