A history of Persian earthquakes / История Персидских землетрясений

Oui choice of title for this book deliberately echoes Dseison’s A Hillary ofBritiih Earthquake!, which was published by the Cambridge University Press early in the 1920s. This was one of the first in recent tiroes to make a systematic study of seismic activity in a particular country, which we have tried to emulate for Iran. By calling our study a history we wish also to emphasise the importance оf time in the unfolding of geologic processes, and of investigating the past when attempting to under-&tand the present.
и was not clear in advance just how mm h ’he study of historical events could lead to a better understating of the generic cause of earthquakes, the processes of continental deformation, and of earthquake risk. The benefit of being able to refer to observations over a period more than ten tiroes longer than the eighty years that have elapsed of this century, however, was obvious. A striking illustration of the likely value of such historical data, and one that gave a germinal impulse to retrieving them, came simply from comparing two maps of world seismicity. The first (figure I) was compiled in the mrd-IgOOs by a painstaking solitary scientist, and tile second (figure 2) was compiled in the mid-1900s, the result of a multimillion dollar effort by a group Df seismologists. Both the similarities and differences between these maps show that the fDimer was anticipatory of later 'discoveries'. Depicted solely on the basis of pre-instrumental, historical data, one can see on the 1857 map almost all the plate boundaries we know todsy. The data used to construct this map are as crude as the hypothesis or theory of plate tectonics that makes one look for such boundaries. However, on the same map one can also clearly see seismicaliy active regions, such as the J ordan Rift and Eastern Anatolian Thrust zones, as well as Eastern China, these being shown as almost totally inactive on the twentieth-century map. <...>