ABSTRACT
Earthquakes elicit some of the most intense fears that human beings can experience. In the 20th century, both Japan and the United States have suffered major, damaging earthquakes. This chapter describes five such destructive earthquakes. The two Japanese earthquakes that have caused the greatest loss of life in this century were the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 and the Kobe earthquake of 1995. In the United States, three earthquakes are described: the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 causing great loss of life, the highest magnitude earthquake in North America in this century - the Alaska earthquake of 1964, and the very costly Northridge, California earthquake of 1994. Earthquakes almost always elicit immediate fear on the part of those who experience them, but are often also linked, more indirectly and yet equally powerfully, with economic and political stability. The distribution of earthquakes at a world scale has been de-scribed as a series of belts or arcs.
