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A Bengali Recipe For Disaster

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DHAKAIn the late afternoon of 12 June 1897 in Assam, northeastern India, the earth began to rumble. The eerie subterranean growl grew louder and louder and after a few minutes the ground began to shake, at rst gently then with such violence that tombstones, masonry, and even people were ung into the air. The Great Assam Earthquake, estimated as high as magnitude 8.7, claimed 1626 lives. Several days later, a team from the Geological Survey of India set out to map the shattered land. This was the rst time someone had resurveyed after an earthquake, says Philip England, a seismologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Over months of wretched work in monsoon downpours, the surveyors measured an astounding 8-meter uplift on the northern edge of Assams Shillong Plateau, extending through the area that today is Bangladesh. Incredulous superiors dismissed the results as erroneous and buried the report. The survey team would eventually be vindicated. And the more experts learn about the Great Assam Earthquake, the starker it stands as a warning to cities on the oodplains of South Asia, including Bangladeshs densely populated capital, Dhaka. Perched on thick, alluvial sediments 200 kilometers south of the epicenter, Dhaka was badly damaged in 1897, says Syed Humayun Akhter, a seismologist at the University of Dhaka. The ground under much of the city

liqueed, destabilizing foundations. Thanks to the earthquakes gradual buildup, most people in Dhaka managed to escape before buildings disintegrated. It was a miracle there were so few deaths, Akhter says. Dhaka may not be so lucky next time. Scientists are nding that both its social features and its geology, including a hidden fault that seismologists believe is gathering stress beneath the sediments, could make the area more vulnerable than appreciated. Few structures in this city of 13 million are built to resist shaking. Even when the ground is quiet, Akhter says, you sometimes read reports of buildings falling down. Shoddy construc-

Mud skipper. Michael Steckler (center) helps lower

instruments into a well in northern Bangladesh.

tion is prevalent across Bangladesh and many other developing nations in seismic danger zones. Its hard to see any realistic way to avoid the looming humanitarian disasters in places like this, says Susan Hough, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena, California. The world is short on both resources and political will to make the necessary investments in risk mitigation. Among disasters waiting to happen, Bangladesh stands out for its unique geography, which is capable of transforming modest quakes into major calamities. A land of superlatives, the country is the worlds most densely populatedmore than 150 million people occupy an area the size of Iowaand is home to the biggest delta and one of the heaviest sediment uxes. Each year the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna rivers carry about 1 billion tons of sediment from the Himalayas, depositing much of it in the Bengal Basin. These sediments, a couple dozen kilometers thick in places, amplify seismic waves and hide active faults. Last February, Akhter and colleagues from Columbia Universitys Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, and other institutions embarked on a 5-year campaign to study the Ganges-BrahmaputraMeghna delta. They will gauge the extent to which that heavy, wet blanket of sediment is ratcheting up seismic strain. They also hope to chart hidden faults, including what they call

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CREDITS (TOP TO BOTTOM): CHRISTOPHER SMALL/LAMONT-DOHERTY EARTH OBSERVATORY/COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY; KEVIN KRAJICK/EARTH INSTITUTE/COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Under a thick blanket of mud in the Bengal Basin, the crust is twisting and crumpling. A major earthquake is inevitable. Can the regions teeming, shoddily built cities avert calamity?

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Houses of cards. Sections of Dhaka are rising on

northeast toward the Himalayas at a rate of 6 centimeters per year, and the Burma Plate, grinding westward at 2 centimeters per year. an astonishing geologic event: They hypoWhen enough stress accumulatesperhaps thesize that the eastern Himalayan front every 3000 years or sothe plateau pops up, an area of folding, crumpling, and mounBilham and England discovered. tain building driven by Indias collision into The seismic waves from the rupture of Asiais jumping forward to a new front 200 the northern fault in 1897 rippled across the kilometers to the south. The new front is raisGanges-Brahmaputra-Meghna delta, jiging the crust of the Shillong Plateau above a gling alluvial sediments like a bowl of pudblind fault under the sediment in Bangladesh. ding. Hough and colleagues have calculated Some potential dangers are already that the shaking was two to four times more known. The Shillong Plateaus southern edge intense in Dhaka and other cities built on sedhas not slipped recently and could uncork a iments than on settlements a similar distance magnitude-8 or greater earthquake. Closer from the epicenter built on rock. This amplito Dhaka, a magnitude-7.5 quake on the fication has been shown to significantly Madhupur fault would level 72,000 buildcontrol shaking and damage in countless ings and kill more than 130,000 people, Ferreting out faults. Syed Humayun Akhter hopes earthquakes, including the 18111812 New according to estimates published by the to uncover evidence of buried geology. Madrid earthquakes, Hough says. Because Bangladesh government in 2009. The most terrain in Bangladesh is soft sediments, biggest threat of all lurks in the east and territory. Although the surveyors felt after- any local earthquake measuring magnitude offshore in the Bay of Bengal: the northern shocks, they did not realize that the entire 5 or more would be punishing, Akhter says. stretch of the Chittagong-Myanmar-Suma- plateau was still moving as they gauged its Another hazard is that when sediments tra plate boundary. On 26 December 2004, dimensions. As a standard accuracy check, are moist, they are primed to liquefy during some 2000 kilometers south of Bangladesh, the team would measure a triangle, at least an earthquake. Liquefaction of soil churned the Sumatra-Andaman earthquakeat mag- 10 kilometers per side. By the time the third coast tracts on New Zealands South Island nitude 9.3, the third largest ever recorded angle of a given triangle had been mea- during the magnitude-6.1 earthquake on 22 ruptured as much as 1500 kilometers of plate sured, days or weeks after the rst, all the February, undermining foundations and leavboundary, triggering tsunami waves that angles had changed by an amount they had ing cars half-buried in sand, Hough says. In killed more than 230,000 people. never hitherto encountered, says seismolo- the Bengal Basin, during summer monsoon Bangladesh has been slow to come to gist Roger Bilham of the University of Colo- rains, the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna terms with the seismic menace. The nation rado, Boulder. Supervisors derided what they rivers deposit a sediment layer up to several is poor. This is reality, Akhter says. But the deemed to be sloppy work. They were wrong, centimeters thick across the delta. Surface government is strengthening the building Bilham says: Shillong Plateau was adjusting ooding and groundwater recharge seasoncode based on revised seismic maps, and its to many thousands of aftershocks. ally pile up 100 billion tons or more of water disaster agency is training 62,000 volunteers Re-examining the data a century later in to the delta. The tremendous pressure can in earthquake response. 2001, Bilham and England calculated that in nudge a fault on the brink of rupture over the the space of a few seconds, the Great Assam edge. Most devastating earthquakes in this Piling up the stress Earthquake had thrust up a 110-kilometer- region have occurred during monsoon time, When the Geological Survey of India team long piece of Shillong about 10 meters. The including the 1897 Assam quake, Akhter says. struck out into the field in the summer of crust beneath the plateau is pinched between Soft sediments are not uniformly bad 1897, they were venturing into uncharted massive forceps: the Indian Plate, crawling news. Like a cars shock absorbers, they can soak up strain from faults. It takes more time for stress Himalaya to build in faults overlain putra Brahma by sediments, and thus the period between large earthGange s Shillong quakes is longer. To better understand how the Ganges-BrahmaBANGLADESH putra-Meghna deltas thick sediments inuence underIndian Dhaka Shield lying faults, Akhter and colleagues have launched an ambitious research campaign. They will drill around 250 scientic wells ta Del to probe sedimentation putra a Ganges-Brahm and tectonics, gauge vertiGrim picture. New studies are shedding light on the Bengal Basins complex tectonics. Most worrisome to geophysicists are cal shortening at two sites where well sets have been the eerily calm Arakan and Tripura segments of the Chittagong-Myanmar-Sumatra plate boundary.
reclaimed land thats prone to liquefaction.
Tri pu ra

PHOTO CREDIT: KEVIN KRAJICK/EARTH INSTITUTE/COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY; MAPS SOURCE: SYED HUMAYUN AKHTER

A ra k a n

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strung with optical fibers, measure electrical resistance of sediments, and use highresolution seismic reflection to map sediments and underlying crust structure. We will attempt to directly measure the compaction of sediments in the deltahow they squish as new sediments are piled on top, says Columbia geophysicist Michael Steckler, the projects principal investigator. A GPS network will monitor strain and a seismic network will record earthquakes, while rock outcroppings near Shillong and along the Chittagong coast in the southeast will be analyzed for evidence of past earthquakes. Planning for the worst On 26 December 2004, in the hours after the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake, Akhter watched at the University of Dhaka as aftershocks marched up the plate boundary toward Bangladesh. People were extremely tense and frightened, he recalls. University ofcials called an emergency meeting that evening on how to cope in the event that the northern segment of the plate boundary were to rupture. According to campus policy, dormitory doors were locked at midnight. We needed to change this without creating panic, Akhter says. Resident teachers were asked to discreetly unlock the doors. Although a northern rupture never materialized, the threat hasnt gone away. The last major earthquake at that end of the fault occurred on 2 April 1762, along the Chittagong coast. The rupture of the Arakan fault segment, estimated to have exceeded magnitude 8, submerged islands just off the coast, triggered mud volcanoes, and caused seiches, inland tsunami waves, that capsized boats on the Buriganga River in Dhaka. Since then, Akhter says, a 600-kilometer stretch of the subduction fault from Myanmar to the Andaman Islands has been a seismic gap: in other words, strangely calm. There are no known ruptures of the onshore Tripura segment, north of Arakan. We have no idea how much strain is building up in these segments, Akhter says. The subduction fault, he and others believe, is due for a major temblor. The Arakan segment would surely unleash a tsunami. Cyclones occasionally score a direct hit on Bangladesh, and the countrys low-lying, funnel-shaped coastline makes storm surges all the more deadly. Cyclone shelters dotting the coastline in principle could offer a haven from tsunami waves. But a tsunami would

Seismic sleuth. Columbia geologist

Leonardo Seeber inspects river sediment layers and a rare intact rock (right) in northern Bangladesh.

make landfall within an hour after a quake on the Arakan or Tripura segments. We would not be able to send a warning in time, Akhter says. A major quake on the Tripura segment, meanwhile, would deal a crippling blow to Dhaka and much of Bangladesh. This is the segment that most worries me, Steckler says. The biggest hazard in Bangladesh may be poor construction. Before Bangladeshs independence in 1971, Akhter says, most buildings had at most three stories. Since then, to accommodate a constant inux of migrant workers, landlords have added oors to many buildings helter-skelter without shoring up foundations, he says. And new housing developments in Dhaka are rising on unconsolidated sediments augmented by lla recipe for liquefaction. Theres little the cash-strapped country can do about existing structures, Akhter says. But he hopes that new building projects will incorporate earthquake-resistant design. We are now trying to convince architects and builders that they have to follow building codes, he says. Adhering to the current Bangladesh National Building Code may not offer sufcient protection. It is based on a seismic zone map prepared by the Geological Survey of Bangladesh in 1979. The zones were drawn up on very scanty data, Akhter says. He calls up a map of the zones on his laptop; a small area of northeast Bangladesh is designated as high risk. To me now, this whole area should be high risk, including Dhaka, Akhter says, tracing out the eastern half of the country, anchored by the Tripura fault segment. The picture is similar in neighboring countries in a seismic belt stretching from northern India across Nepal and Bhutan and down through Bangladesh and Myanmar. The 26 January 2001 earthquake that leveled Gujarat, India, killing 20,000 people, happened in a region long known to be at high risk for shocks, Bilham says. But the code was so unevenly applied, he says, that the same percentage of the population was killed in collapsed buildings in 2001 as in an earthquake

RICHARD STONE

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in 1819when earthquake-resistant construction was unknown. Theres no magic wand that will make a vulnerable city in the developing world safe, Hough says. Bilham argues that it is essential to replace the ancient building stock of cities. That would substantially reduce the carnage, he says, and it would make politicians and urban planners look less culpable than they do now. It would take decades to gird cities in the developing world against earthquakes. In the meantime, Hough says, cash-strapped nations can take discrete steps. One realistic goal, she says, is to shore up critical facilities like hospitals, schools, and airports. Toward that end, politicians need advice, and pressure, from experts. One of the most important things the international community can do is to help train and support local communities of earthquake professionals, Hough says. The task is daunting. Many decades will pass before the developing world can hope to approach the levels of resilience that are potentially achievable, England and James Jackson of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom warn in this months issue of Nature Geoscience. During this time millions of people will be affected by earthquakes on faults that have not been recognized, they write. The highest scientific priority, they argue, is to map with precision where the level of seismic hazard is increasing in the regions of greatest risk: the 10 million square kilometers of the AlpineHimalayan belt, which stretches from Italy, Greece, and Turkey, across the Middle East, Iran, and central Asia, to India, China, and, of course, Bangladesh. Back in his ofce, Akhter calls up a map of Bangladesh with red dots indicating major earthquakes. From 1869 to 1930, ve temblors with a magnitude of seven or higher rattled the country. Its been 80 years since the last big earthquake, he says. In that time, Dhakas population has grown 10-fold. The perils are incalculable.

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