Scary!

This is a particular worry for Tokyo, which Bill McGuire, a hazards specialist at University College in London, describes as `the city waiting to die` (not a motto you will find on many tourism leaflets). Tokyo stands on the meeting point of three tectonic plates in a country already well known for its seismic instability. In 1995, as you will remember, the city of Kobe, nearly 500 kilometres to the west, was struck by a magnitude 7.2 quake, which killed 6,394 people. The damage was estimated at $99 billion. But that was as nothing-well, as comparatively, little-compared with what may await Tokyo.

Tokyo has already suffered one of the most devastating earthquakes in modern times. On 1 September 1923, just before midday, the city was hit by what is known as the Great Kanto quake-an event over ten times as powerful as Kobe`s earthquake. Two hundrend thousand people were killed. Since that time, Tokyo has been eerily quiet, so the strain beneath the surface has been building for eighty years. Eventually it is bound to snap. In 1923, Tokyo had a population of about three million. Today it is approaching thirty million. Nobody cares to guess how many people might die, but the potential economic cost has been put as high as $7 trillion.

A Short History of Nearly Everything

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Bill Bryson