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SINGAPORE: A powerful earthquake of magnitude 7.7 centered in the Sagaing region near the Myanmar city of Mandalay caused extensive damage in that country and also shook neighboring Thailand on Friday.

How vulnerable is Myanmar to earthquakes?

Myanmar lies on the boundary between two tectonic plates and is one of the world’s most seismically active countries, although large and destructive earthquakes have been relatively rare in the Sagaing region.

“The plate boundary between the India Plate and Eurasia Plate runs approximately north-south, cutting through the middle of the country,” said Joanna Faure Walker, a professor and earthquake expert at University College London.
She said the plates move past each other horizontally at different speeds. While this causes “strike slip” quakes that are normally less powerful than those seen in “subduction zones” like Sumatra, where one plate slides under another, they can still reach magnitudes of 7 to 8.

Why was Friday’s quake so damaging?
Sagaing has been hit by several quakes in recent years, with a 6.8 magnitude event causing at least 26 deaths and dozens of injuries in late 2012.
But Friday’s event was “probably the biggest” to hit Myanmar’s mainland in three quarters of a century, said Bill McGuire, another earthquake expert at UCL.
Roger Musson, honorary research fellow at the British Geological Survey, told Reuters that the shallow depth of the quake meant the damage would be more severe. The quake’s epicenter was at a depth of just 10 km (6.2 miles), according to the United States Geological Survey.
“This is very damaging because it has occurred at a shallow depth, so the shockwaves are not dissipated as they go from the focus of the earthquake up to the surface. The buildings received the full force of the shaking.”
“It’s important not to be focused on epicenters because the seismic waves don’t radiate out from the epicenter — they radiate out from the whole line of the fault,” he added.

How prepared was Myanmar?

The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program said on Friday that fatalities could be between 10,000 and 100,000 people, and the economic impact could be as high as 70 percent of Myanmar’s GDP.
Musson said such forecasts are based on data from past earthquakes and on Myanmar’s size, location and overall quake readiness.
The relative rarity of large seismic events in the Sagaing region — which is close to heavily populated Mandalay — means that infrastructure had not been built to withstand them. That means the damage could end up being far worse.
Musson said that the last major quake to hit the region was in 1956, and homes are unlikely to have been built to withstand seismic forces as powerful as those that hit on Friday.
“Most of the seismicity in Myanmar is further to the west whereas this is running down the center of the country,” he said.
 

Tokyo: The United States will ensure “robust, ready and credible deterrence” in the Asia-Pacific, including across the Taiwan Strait, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Sunday, calling Chinese actions “aggressive and coercive.”
Speaking in Japan, Hegseth also stopped short of publicly calling on Tokyo to increase military spending, saying he trusted the close US ally to “make the correct determination of what capabilities are needed.”
“America is committed to sustaining robust, ready and credible deterrence in the Indo-Pacific, including across the Taiwan Strait,” Hegseth said, using Washington’s term for the Asia-Pacific region.
“Japan would be on the frontlines of any contingency we might face in the western Pacific and we stand together in support of each other,” he told reporters after talks with Japanese counterpart Gen Nakatani.
“That is why today Minister Nakatani and I talked about the severe and urgent security environment around Japan, and we discussed what we are going to do about it.”
Beijing has stepped up military pressure in recent years around Taiwan, including near-daily air incursions, and has not ruled out using force to bring the island under its control.

Okinawa base
Japan and the United States are each other’s top foreign investors, and 54,000 US military personnel are stationed in Japan — mostly in Okinawa, east of Taiwan.
But Trump’s “America First” approach could mean weakening the US commitment for security in the region as well as more pressure — like in Europe — on allies to spend more.
Hegseth said that he “did not talk specific numbers” about defense spending in his talks with Nakatani and Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba.
“We’re confident that Japan will make the correct determination of what capabilities are needed inside our alliance to make sure we are standing shoulder to shoulder,” he said.
“They have been a model ally, and we have no doubt that will continue. But we also both recognize everybody needs to do more.”
Japan has been shedding its strict pacifist stance, moving to obtain “counterstrike” capabilities and doubling military spending to the NATO standard of two percent of GDP.
But Washington could ask it to do more, with Trump’s nominee for a key Pentagon policy position, Elbridge Colby, calling for defense spending of three percent of GDP.
Nakatani said Sunday that he told Hegseth that spending should be “implemented based on Japan’s own judgment and responsibility.”
“I also explained Japan has continuously been working on a drastic strengthening of out defense capability... on which we received understanding from the US side,” he said.
Hegseth said the Tokyo meetings “affirmed the extraordinary strength of America’s alliance with Japan.”
“President Trump has also made it very clear, and we reiterate, we are going to put America first. But America first does not mean America alone,” he added.
“America and Japan stand firmly together in the face of aggressive and coercive actions by the Communist Chinese.”