Seismic areas of the world

An earthquake is a geological event that appears when big pieces of the earth's crust, tectonic plates, move or shift suddenly. The shaking being the effect of the tectonic plates pounding against one another during this movement. Although the shaking in and of itself is rarely dangerous, the movement of the ground can destabilize surface construction, and even suddenly change the topography of the land itself. Most earthquake hazards are concerned about the effect of shaking on man-made structures, such as buildings, dams, and pipelines above or around the epicenter of a quake. A seismic area is a zone in which the seismic rate remains almost consistent. This mean's that seismic activity is very rare or extremely common. People use often the term seismic zone to speak of an area with an increased risk of seismic activity, while others prefer to talk of seismic hazard zones when discussing areas where seismic activity is more common.

Many countries have government agencies that occupies with seismic activity. These agencies use the data they collect about seismic activity to divide their country into different seismic zones. A number of different zoning systems are used, from numerical zones to colored zones, with each number or color representing a different level of seismic activity. In US for example, the seismic zones are separated from one to five, with zone five being the most seismic risk zone.

High-activity seismic zones are located along fault zones, regions of the Earth's crust which are likely to seismic activity. Fault zones usually

occur where continental plates meet, but they are also found around volcanoes. By diveding a nation up into different seismic zones, a nation can found areas which are at high risk. These zones could have more stringent building codes which are designed to make them safer during an earthquake, and emergency services in a high risk seismic zone may be required to have special earthquake training and frequent drills to practice responding to an earthquake. One of the biggest hazards beyond the basic shaking of an earthquake for people in a high-activity seismic zone is liquefaction. Soil liquefaction occurs when loose sediments become suspended in water as a result of seismic activity which pushes the water table upward. When soil liquefaction occurs, the ground is no longer able to support the weight of buildings, highways, and other structures, causing collapses to occur. Underground utility lines may be severed in the process, resulting in potentially explosive leaks of gas along with widespread contamination with sewage. In highactivity zones which are also subject to liquefaction, an earthquake can be extremely dangerous.

Probably many are wondering what causes earthquakes,here's as an answer given by Dr. Gerard Fryer from Hawaii Institute of Geophysics & Planetology

University of Hawaii, Honolulu "The short answer is that earthquakes are caused by faulting, a sudden lateral or
vertical movement of rock along a rupture (break) surface. Here's the longer answer: The surface of the Earth is in continuous slow motion. This is plate tectonics-the motion of immense rigid plates at the surface of the Earth in response to flow of rock within the Earth.

The plates cover the entire surface of the globe. Since they are all moving they rub against each other in some places (like the San Andreas Fault in California)

sink beneath each other in others (like the Peru-Chile Trench along the western border of South America)

or spread apart from each other (like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge)

At such places the motion isn't smooth--the plates are stuck together at the edges but the rest of each plate is continuing to move, so the rocks along the edges are distorted (what we call "strain"). As the motion continues, the strain builds up to the point where the rock cannot withstand any more bending. With a lurch, the rock breaks and the two sides move. An earthquake is the shaking that radiates out from the breaking rock. People have known about earthquakes for thousands of years, of course, but they didn't know what caused them. In particular, people believed that the breaks in the Earth's surface--faults--which appear after earthquakes, were caused by the earthquakes rather than the cause of them. It was Bunjiro Koto, a geologist in Japan studying a 60-mile long fault whose two sides shifted about 15 feet in the great Japanese earthquake of 1871, who first suggested that earthquakes were caused by faults. Henry Reid, studying the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, took the idea further. He said that an earthquake is the huge amount of energy released when accumulated strain causes a fault to rupture. He explained that rock twisted further and further out of shape by continuing forces over the centuries eventually yields in a wrenching snap as the two sides of the fault slip to a new position to relieve the strain. This is the idea of "elastic rebound" which is now central to all studies of fault rupture."