Filipinos play a perpetual guessing game with earthquakes
Credit to Author: THE MANILA TIMES| Date: Sun, 03 Nov 2019 16:20:12 +0000
IT is striking that the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) does not assign names to earthquakes that hit the country in the same way that the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa) gives a local name to tropical cyclones when they enter the Philippine area of responsibility.
There is, we think, a sound reason for resisting the temptation to also name earthquakes.
An earthquake of high magnitude is infinitely more frightening and devastating than a typhoon or cyclone. Giving it a name will only give people a false sense of intimacy or understanding of this natural disaster, whose occurrence cannot be predicted and that happens unexpectedly and then breaks into a series of shocks or multiple aftershocks, which are oftentimes just as devastating.
Per tradition and practice, earthquakes are memorialized by volcanologists based on the year and time when they occur, or on the name of the volcano that sets them off. People and authorities get around to assessing an earthquake’s heavy toll in lives and property much faster.
Thus the world remembers, the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption and earthquake whose global impact is reckoned to this day.
We believe a Filipino citizen or Philippine president cannot be burdened with too much information about the danger of earthquakes in the Philippines. Information or knowledge about this disaster is perhaps our best defense or chance of survival against this ordeal.
The Philippines happens to be located within the famous Ring of Fire that is legendary in the literature and history of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions since prehistory.
The Ring of Fire, also known as the Rim of Fire or the Circum-Pacific Belt, is a major area in the basin of the Pacific Ocean where many earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur. In a large 40,000-kilometer (25,000-mile) horseshoe shape, it is associated with a nearly continuous series of oceanic trenches, volcanic arcs and volcanic belts and plate movements. It has 452 volcanoes (more than 75 percent of the world’s active and dormant volcanoes).
About 90 percent of the world’s earthquakes and about 81 percent of the world’s largest earthquakes occur along the Ring of Fire. All but three of the world’s 25 largest volcanic eruptions of the last 11,700 years occurred at volcanoes in the Ring of Fire.
Living within the ring of fire is a distinction we share with the Japanese, the Indonesians and the people of the Mariana Islands, Bougainville, Tonga and New Zealand.
Rappler, with the help of Phivolcs, has drawn a map of the earthquakes that have occurred in the Philippines since the 1600s. It reports that since that time there have been around 148 earthquakes in the Philippines with a magnitude of 6 or higher.
In the seismicity map constructed by Phivolcs, only Palawan has not been visited by destructive earthquakes. Every province or island has had its share of heartbreak and horror.
The strongest recorded earthquakes to have hit the Philippine archipelago occurred on Sept. 20 and 21, 1897, in the Celebes Sea area, between the islands of Sulu and Basilan.
While no succeeding earthquakes have so far matched the intensity of the July 1990 quake, it is not the strongest in national history. In fact, the 7.8-magnitude record that year is only seventh among the strongest that have hit the country.
The question that torments many of our people today is when an earthquake or volcanic eruption will strike their province, city or municipality.
The fact is there is no way that anyone can predict when this horrible disaster will strike. We can only cope with its awful reality and fury in the same brave way that our Japanese and Indonesian brothers have coped in recent years.