Breaking Omori's Law of Public Awareness

Abstract

As seismologists dedicated to studying one of the Earth's most dangerous natural phenomena, we are inured to the reality that public interest in our field surges after a significant earthquake and decays rapidly afterward to a rather low background level. This would be little more than a curiosity were it not for the fact that understanding earthquakes and their effects could make a big difference to the lives and livelihoods of much of that public. Moreover, the political will to make pre-emptive investments in monitoring, research, preparedness, and mitigation wanes with decreasing public interest. Ironically, we can point with increasing confidence to areas of habitation and economic production most exposed to earthquakes and other natural hazards, and we can even treat the issue in economic terms, evaluating risk reduction as an investment. What will it take to change the disaster management culture from one that relies on emergency response to one that promotes mitigation? Will sustained interest in natural hazard reduction accelerate the translation of research outcomes into practice? Will political interest continue to follow public awareness? Justified as they may still be, simply asking these old rhetorical questions is not enough. The Sumatra-Andaman Islands earthquake and Indian Ocean tsunami struck deeply into the heart of some of the central questions of our time: the gap between rich and poor, between those who benefit from advanced understanding of our natural world and those who haven't yet seen the impact of knowledge, between those who contemplate the relationship between man and nature and those who ignore it. This time may be different, and the science enterprise has the responsibility to recognize and act on the evidence …