Question: Which is the most destructive earthquake you have studied

Tim Craig answered on 11 Jun 2018:

I usually study smaller earthquakes, that don’t do too much damage – we have data for far more of these, which gives us a much larger dataset to work with . But I’ve been involved in larger studies of a few big earthquakes – some that you might have heard of: the 2004 Boxing Day earthquake near Sumatra (a magnitude 9), and the sequence of earthquakes in Central Italy two years ago.