SECED

2009 Mallet Milne Lecture on The Seismic Future of Cities

Speaker: Professor Roger Bilham, Professor of Geology, University of Colorado

Synopsis:

The final projected doubling in Earth's population in the next half century requires a projected additional 1 billion housing units, more dwellings constructed in a single generation than at any time in Earth's history. Earth's tenfold increase in population has occurred during a time that is short compared to the return time of damaging earthquakes. In the next century, therefore, earthquakes that had little impact on villages and towns will be shaking supercities housing upwards of 12 million people. In the past, catastrophic earthquakes have killed more than 10% of the epicentral population, hence, an epicentral hit on one of our new urban agglomerations has the potential to cause 1 million fatalities. Earthquake resistant construction often takes a backseat to perceived more pressing needs in the developing nations. Never has a generation of earthquake engineers been faced with such a grave responsibility to exercise their skills, both political and technical, as now.

Speaker:

Roger Bilham was awarded degrees in Physics (1966) and Geology (1967) at the University of Wales, Cardiff, and in 1971 a PhD in Geophysics from Cambridge University. From 1975-85, following a post-doctoral appointment in Cambridge, he joined the earthquake deformation monitoring program at Columbia University's Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, ultimately as a Doherty Fellow. In 1986 he was appointed a Professor of Geology at the University of Colorado, where he co-founded UNAVCO, the US consortium to apply GPS techniques to tectonic studies. His more than 180 articles of the past three decades describe new instruments for tilt and creep monitoring, historical archive studies of pre-instrumental earthquakes, and details of ongoing plate boundary deformation processes occurring in Iceland, the Caribbean, Venezuela, the US, Africa, India, Pakistan and Tibet. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and an Associate Director of CIRES, University of Colorado.

Date & Time: 27-05-2009 at 18:00

Location: Institution Of Civil Engineers, One Great George Street, London

Organiser: Ian Smith

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