What Should You Do IMMEDIATELY During an Earthquake? | Myths & Misconceptions Debunked

the ground starts shaking and your surroundings start tumbling.

What do you do?

Because we’re here to teach you the dos and don’ts of earthquake survival, because as it happens,

there’s actually quite a lot of bad advice and misinformation surrounding this very topic.

I’m Stu, this is Debunked, and we’re here to sort the truths from the myths,

and the facts from the misconceptions.

First of all… what exactly is an earthquake?

Well, technically-speaking, earthquakes are seismic activity caused by a sudden

release of energy in the Earth's rocky, outermost layer, known as the ‘lithosphere’,

although the term ‘earthquake’ may often be used

more generally to refer to any and all shaking of the ground.

Although earthquakes can be triggered by a range of things, such as volcanic activity,

meteor impacts, or even human exploits like mining operations or nuclear blasts,

the majority are caused by tectonic activity.

To understand this, we need to understand the structure of the planet itself.

The Earth is made up of a number of layers ranging from the inner core at the planet’s center,

through the outer core and mantle, all the way up to the Earth’s surface

known as the crust. These layers are not uniformly solid, and over sufficiently long

timescales much of the planet’s inner material moves like a viscous fluid.

It is this movement that causes the planet’s major tectonic plates to push against each other,

creating friction at their boundaries known as ‘fault lines’, which locks them in place. This

causes the build-up of elastic strain between the plates, which increases over time. Eventually,

the friction can no longer overcome this strain, at which point all the stored energy is released

at once. This sudden burst of built-up energy moves through the planet in the form of seismic

waves, which is what causes the shaking of the ground that we call an earthquake.

Estimates of the number of earthquakes that occur

annually range from hundreds of thousands to several million.

The vast majority of these are minor and many cannot be felt at all;

particularly powerful earthquakes, however, cause extremely strong shaking of the ground,

and can displace and break up huge quantities of earth.

Globally, approximately 90% of the world’s earthquakes occur along the

so-called ‘Circum-Pacific Belt’, which is known more commonly as the ‘Ring of Fire’.

This huge area of the planet stretches around the coastal regions at the edges

of the Pacific Ocean, and includes some of the most quake-prone places on Earth,

such as South East Asia, Japan, the west coast of the United States, and Chile.

It’s worth noting that it isn’t usually the shaking of the ground itself that is dangerous

to humans. If a person happens to find themselves in a wide open space when an earthquake strikes,

it’s easy enough to avoid injury by simply sitting on the ground and waiting it out.

What makes earthquakes dangerous is how quickly and completely they can destroy