Residents of Baku, a handsome city awash in petrodollars, have been given something new to worry about by earthquake forecasters from the Massachusetts Institute for Technology.
While buildings in the Azerbaijani capital are soaring ever upwards, seismic tension down below is building ever deeper, and could cause a devastating earthquake, MIT scientists announced in a June 14 statement.
Ten years of GPS tracking of seismic shifts suggest that fault lines near Baku may snap under the strain of a face-off between the North Eurasian and South Arabian plates, they found. That means that the city could share the fate of Azerbaijan's former capital of Shemakha, leveled by a quake in 1859.
“It is an extremely vulnerable area in terms of density of the people, the density of oil infrastructure, and potential environmental impact regionally; not just Azerbaijan,” commented principal research scientist Robert Reillinger to MITnews.
The good news is that the MIT people are not sure about it. Similar observations did little to predict the 2011 Japan earthquake and fickle mother earth is still largely beyond predictions.
If it is any reassurance, Azerbaijani scientists rejected the forecasts of their colleagues in Massachusetts and noted that Baku's Soviet-era buildings can withstand six or seven-magnitude tremors -- a finding that didn't hold during the city's 2000 earthquake (7 on the Richter scale).
The question is what to do about it. For now, MIT scientists have called on the Azerbaijani government to install additional GPS observation stations to increase the odds of Baku residents surviving if a mega-quake hits.
Said Reillinger: “It doesn’t take a gigantic earthquake. It just takes bad luck."