The Impacts Of Tectonic Hazards

If living near a volcano or fault line is so dangerous, why do hundreds of millions of people do it? The answer is that tectonic regions offer real rewards, from fertile soils to geothermal energy, and many people simply have nowhere else to go. When disaster strikes, though, the same event can kill a few people in one country and hundreds of thousands in another.

In this lesson you will weigh up the reasons people accept the risk, examine the social, economic and environmental impacts of earthquakes and eruptions, and master the scales geographers use to measure these events: the Richter and moment magnitude scales, the Mercalli scale and the volcanic explosivity index. You will see why magnitude alone never tells the whole story.