Time and time again we see earthquakes strike densely populated areas (Fig. 1), a correlation that is not coincidental in continental Asia. Many population centres in this region owe their existence to the presence of active faults that shape the landscape and channel water, creating habitable areas in a region with harsh conditions² that are likely to worsen with climate change. The environmental pressures exacerbate the challenges: urban areas and infrastructure projects across the region are expanding rapidly in zones of unknown or unquantified earthquake hazard.

Warnings are sometimes found in recent history, such as the 1948 earthquake that decimated Aşgabat, Turkmenistan³ (“3” in Fig. 1). Elsewhere, there is need to go further back to demonstrate seismic hazard potential^4,5, for instance to the earthquake in Xi’an (China) (“4” in Fig. 1) in 1556, which killed 830,000 people, a death toll that remains the largest recorded⁶. It is not a matter of if, but when these cities will once again be hit. Many such cities have undergone rapid growth in recent decades and thus have much greater exposure. Almaty in Kazakhstan (“5” in Fig. 1), for example, was badly damaged by earthquakes in 1887, 1889 and 1911 (ref. ⁷). In early 2024, after over a century of seismic quiescence, two strongly felt events shook a city now home to 2 million people. This nature of earthquake disasters — centuries of calm being punctuated by instants of devastation — adds to the difficulty of mitigating their effects; memories rapidly fade and attention quickly diverts elsewhere.