Blaming people for earthquakes

I've just been quoted in an interesting article from Newsweek (for link, see below) about the dangers that human activities such as fracking might cause earthquakes.

I talk about two quakes - the first hit Antioch in what is now Turkey, but was then one of the biggest cities in the Roman empire, in AD 115. It nearly killed the emperor Trajan and the future emperor, Hadrian, commissioner of the famous wall.

Trajan believed it had happened because the spread of Christianity had made the old Roman gods angry, so he had the local bishop thrown to wild animals at the Colosseum in Rome. An estimated 300,000 people died in another earthquake in Antioch in 526, after which the city never recovered its former greatness.

The other earthquake I mention is the one that hit Lisbon, then the centre of a great global empire, on November 1 - All Saints' Day - 1755 (pictured). After the quake, fires burned for six days, destroying 85 per cent of the city including scores of convents, 30 monasteries, many churches and the headquarters of the Inquisition. The red light district emerged unscathed, to the amusement of many in Protestant countries.

For more details on both, see A Disastrous History of the World.

This is the Newsweek story - http://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/29/man-made-earthquakes-are-proliferating-we-wont-admit-fault-266531.html

Turkish earthquake

Turkey’s second major earthquake of the year has now claimed at least 575 lives.   It struck the eastern town of Ercis, which has nearly 100,000 inhabitants, on Sunday.   More than 180 people have been pulled from the wreckage, including a 13 year old boy in the early hours of yesterday, but now hopes of finding anyone else alive are fading.

Tens of thousands of people have been made homeless, and the nights are freezing cold.   Most of those living in the region are Kurds – an ethnic minority that has been battling to have its own country - and the Turkish government had been criticised for what some saw as a sluggish initial response. 

I was in Istanbul at the time of the last earthquake in May, which struck the western Kutahya region, about 100 miles away, killing two people.    Some people in Istanbul said they felt the tremor, though I did not.

Perhaps the worst earthquake in Turkey’s history was the one that destroyed the famous city of Antioch in 526, killing up to 300,000 (see my blog of Jan 22, 2010).   The deadliest of recent years was the Izmit quake of 1999, which caused at least 17,000 deaths in the area, about 40 miles from Istanbul.