| Issue |
J. Phys. I France
Volume 5, Number 12, December 1995
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Page(s) | 1681 - 1668 | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/jp1:1995223 | |
J. Phys. I France 5 (1995) 1681-1668
Eartkquake Death Tolls
Leon Knopoff1 and Didier Sornette21 Department of Physics and Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA
2 Laboratoire de Physique de la Matière Condensée. CNRS URA 190. Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, BP. 71, Parc Valrose, 06108 Nice Cedex 2, France
(Received 12 August 1995, accepted 31 August 1995)
Abstract
In the risk and insurance literature, the (one-point) distributions of losses in natural disasters have been
proposed to be characterized by "fat tail" power laws, i.e. very large destruction may occur with
a non-vanishing rate. A naive hypothesis of uncorrelated Poissonian occurrence would suggest that
the losses are solely characterized by the properties of the underlying power law distributions, i.e.
the longer we wait, the more dramatic will be the largest disaster, which could be as much as a
finite fraction of the total population or the total wealth of a country. We find indeed that the
numbers
Z of deaths in the very largest earthquakes of this century can be described by a power law
distribution
with
, implying an unbounded behavior
for the most devastating earthquakes. However, the distribution of the number of deaths per capita
in each country in this century has a well-defined maximum value, suggesting that the naive extrapolation of the
power law distribution is incorrect and that the understanding of correlations is necessary to
ascertain the level of risk from natural disasters. The one-point distributions only provide an
upper bound of the expected risk. We propose a speculative model to explain the correlations between
deaths in large earthquakes and their countries of occurrence: we suggest that large ancient
civilizations that have matured into large present-day populations were the beneficiaries of
isolation from marauders due to the relative geographic protection by tectonic processes largely of
an orogenic nature.
© Les Editions de Physique 1995