This study investigated the psychological reactions of survivors of the 512 Wenchuan earthquake in China and the risk factors associated with those reactions. The Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R), Type D Scale-14 (DS14), a self-developed trauma experience questionniare, and a demographic questionnaire were administered to 956 earthquake survivors (389 males and 567 females) in Mianzhu, one...

OBJECTIVE The current longitudinal study aims to examine the bidirectional relationship between post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) and post-traumatic growth (PTG). METHOD One hundred twenty-two adults in the most severely affected area were investigated by self-report questionnaires at 12 months and 18 months after the Wenchuan Earthquake occurred in China. RESULTS The autoregressive cro...

The Chinese Wenchuan earthquake, which happened on the 28th of May in 2008, may leave deep invisible scars in individuals. China has a large number of children and adolescents, who tend to be most vulnerable because they are in an early stage of human development and possible post-traumatic psychological distress may have a life-long consequence. Trauma survivors without post-traumatic stress d...

Introduction In recent years, large earthquakes have occurred frequently all over the world.1-5 Earthquakes cause a large number of casualties with their catastrophic force. On May 12, 2008, an earthquake of 8.0 magnitude occurred in Wenchuan, Sichuan Province, in China. By May 25, 2008, 68,712 people had died, 374,640 were wounded, and 17,042 were reported missing. On January 12, 2010, a 7.3-m...

The recent Mw 6.3 destructive L’Aquila earthquake has further stimulated the improvement of the Italian operational earthquake forecasting capability at different time intervals. Here, we describe a medium-term (10-year) forecast model for Mw ≥5:5 earthquakes in Italy that aims at opening new possibilities for risk mitigation purposes. While a longer forecast yielded by the national seismic-haz...

Car accidents and gun-shot injuries are the most common causes of spinal cord injury. Five percent of those patients who have a complete spinal cord injury will experience improvement, to some extent. The lack of specific data in the literature regarding the outcome of earthquake related spinal cord injury justified us to design this study where we evaluated the neurological outcome and related...

In order to conduct empirical casualty modelling in China, Chinese historical earthquake events is the essential basis. However, commonly used casualty databases that focus on Chinese earthquakes and provide comprehensive information rarely exist. Regarding this situation, we derived an earthquake casualty database of Mainland China from authorized Chinese published data sources. The casualty d...

Earthquake hazard assessments and rupture forecasts are based on the potential length of seismic rupture and whether or not slip is arrested at fault segment boundaries. Such forecasts do not generally consider that one earthquake can trigger a second large event, near-instantaneously, at distances greater than a few kilometres. Here we present a geodetic and seismological analysis of a magnitu...

Our purpose is to analyze the causes of recent failures in earthquake forecasting, as well as the difficulties in earthquake investigation. We then propose that more rigorous methods are necessary in earthquake seismology research. First, we discuss the failures of direct earthquake forecasts and the poor quantitative predictive power of theoretical and computer simulation methods in explaining...

Abstract Deep-focus earthquakes in the Tonga–Fiji subduction zone make up greater than 66% of the globally recorded deep seismicity. The high number of deep-focus seismicity in this active subduction zone allows us to search for deep-focus similar earthquake pairs and repeating earthquakes. We compile a waveform dataset for deep earthquakes with magnitude above 4.7 occurring in the Tonga–Fiji–K...