Talk on Earthquake hazards in Central Asia

Cambridge Central Asia Forum invites you to a talk on

Earthquake hazards in Central Asia

by

Richard Walker (University of Oxford)

Date: 27 February

Time: 11am-1pm

Venue: Room S3, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT

Online Zoom registration link: https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/-MP7-0DqQCqforJqgXf6WA#/ 

Everyone is welcome.  

Abstract: Central Asia is a region of earthquake hazard, and the rapid urban growth and infrastructure development of past decades often occurs in regions that have been struck in the past. For example Almaty, Kazakhstan, with a population of 2 Million, was badly damaged by a magnitude 7.3 event in 1887, and two extremely large events of magnitude 8 that struck the city in 1889 and 1911. Ashgabat, the capital city of Turkmenistan, was destroyed with much loss of life in a poorly understood earthquake in 1948. Hazards are spread across the Central Asia region, with large 20th century earthquakes also in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. In this lecture I will provide an overview of a research programme that spans the central Asia and South Caucasus regions, focussed on the regional tectonics, the structure of faults and their behaviour in past large earthquakes, and the implications for earthquake hazards. I will focus on recent projects where our work has the potential for societal impact, both through the implementation of improved earthquake awareness into construction, and also through the development of international networks and activities for capacity strengthening.

Biography: Richard Walker is a Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at Oxford University, and official fellow and theme lead in Environmental Change at Reuben College, Oxford, and an Associate Researcher at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) in Rome, Italy. His research combines remote sensing, detailed field investigation, earthquake studies, and Quaternary dating methods to quantify the distribution, rates, and evolution of active faulting within deforming parts of the continents. He has extensive experience of working in actively deforming areas (e.g. China, the Tien Shan, Iran, Mongolia) and has investigated Earth deformation ranging in scale from individual earthquakes through to the evolution of entire mountain ranges.