Spatiotemporal Analysis of Earthquake Distribution and Associated Losses in Chinese Mainland from 1949 to 2021

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

Thank you for improving your manuscript but I am still considering the following modifications to the manuscript:

 

Line 78 earthquake instead of earthquake

Specific EQs are mentioned as M or Ms in the text. Are you using different types of magnitude? You should specify the magnitude and the intensity scale in Table 1 (the name of the EQ that you use in the manuscript will help to read it: Tangshan, Bohai, and so on)

Line 153-158 I will use another word instead of unusual earthquake. You mean that the fatalities are anomalous if you compare with another EQs with the same magnitude (but you explain why in the text).

Line 157. 1970 Xiji EQ killed 117 people but fig. 4 shows around 100.

As a pointed out in previous revisions authors are not explaining the main “anomalous” data in the fig. 4, 10 or 12. In fig. 4 you explained 1969 Bohai and 1970 Xiji EQ, but you do not explain the two 7<M<8 EQs before 1960 with around 10 deaths. In fig. 10 it seems that the fatalities for 7<M<8 are growing with the depth but you do not explain why. I would explain a possible reason why the magnitude of deathliest EQ is lower than the second deathliest

In fig. 12 you do not explain why the 1981 Dafou EQ killed more than 100 people (1970 Xiji EQ was explained in another section). 3 EQs with intensity V (lines 280-282) caused 3 fatalities (lines 288-289) but fig. 12 shows one EQ with 1 fatality and another one with 2 but 3 fatalities are not shown in the fig. for intensity V. I consider that it would be interesting to explain why the two EQs with intensity X caused less than 100 fatalities and some comment for the 3 EQs with intensities higher than X. Why are the exceptions? because the depth, distance to population, etc. I would explain the EQs which are not following the trend, like around 20000 fatalities (IX), 100 fatalities (X) or 3000 fatalities (XII)

You could use the same numbers as those in Table 1 in fig. 4, 10 and 12 (as you already did in Fig.3)

As I pointed out in previous revisions I would consider to duplicate fig. 4, 10 and 12 considering economic losses. If economic losses are not discussed I did not include them in the keywords and the title should be focused on casualties.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)

This manuscript has a low level of originality. However, it was improved, compared to the previous version.

The discussion part at the end of the manuscript should refer more to the results obtained within this research, and not focus on other studies or future researches. Also, it should include a clearer description of the replicability of the results and on their use, either in practice or in other studies. 

A check of the English language is required and some sentences should be rewritten.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report (Previous Reviewer 3)

The authors have significantly improved their work and rewritten several parts. However, many points still need to be addressed in the current version of the paper.  Some of these are presented below:

 

• As I have already pointed out in my first review, I strongly recommend not using references in Chinese since English is the official language of the journal “Sustainability.” There still are several references in Chinese.

 

• In this improved version, the authors clarify that the present work intends to compile a reliable database of historical earthquake information. Later, the authors state that their results “can serve as a reference for the subsequent prediction of losses caused by earthquakes.” However, there is no explanation about how their results can be helpful for that purpose. What are the connections between a database of earthquake losses and the prediction of earthquake losses?

 

• In the response letters, the authors state, “N in this study refers to the cumulative number of earthquakes that caused casualties or economic losses.” But, there is no information about that in Fig.1 or the text body. The caption of Fig.1 is written “cumulative number N of earthquakes.” It should be clarified.

 

• The authors state that the number of earthquakes in summer is significantly higher than in the other three seasons. However, the difference between summer and winter is less than 16% (Table 3). Besides that, what this result means? What is the relevance? The authors do not try to produce any explanation on the reasons why it happens or what are the implications of that result.

 

• The paper shows more causalities in regions with more population density. They also found that the number of fatalities shows a roughly increasing trend with increasing intensity. Both results are well-known facts, and no scientific advance has been produced with those results. An interesting result could be the “seismic risk,” which measures the probability that a subject site will be adversely affected by a seismic hazard.

 

 

In my opinion, it needs to be clarified what new insights or contributions the study makes to the scientific community. While the comprehensive earthquake data analysis is valuable, the paper would benefit from more in-depth exploration and interpretation of the results. Overall, the study provides a helpful summary of earthquake events in China over time and space. However, further research and analysis would be necessary to generate new scientific knowledge and insights.

To enhance the clarity and effectiveness of the paper, the authors could discuss the potential implications of their findings for practical applications. By addressing these points, the authors could better communicate the value and relevance of their work to the scientific community.

 

Author Response

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Reviewer 4 Report (New Reviewer)

Tongyan Zheng and his colleagues submitted an interesting manuscript to sustainaibility. In this manuscript, the have acquired a huge data on earthquake from 1949 to 2021 in which they performed spatiotemporal analysis with hazards implications. This is just a compilation of dataset where I can not find any novel idea. I would like to know what has been newly presented? Authors are advised to tell the readers what different they have done. The English composition is really poor, it needs considerable improvements. Abstract is not well-written, please improve. In the methods section, they only discussed GR relationship by plotting relationship between magnitude and frequency, this is not something very great. Its very basic thing. How was the databased edited? I don't understand, please explain. Please add a section to discuss the tectonic importance of the regions selected for this study. Discussion needs to be more logical in section 4. Also, provide a tectonic map of China showing major deformations, structures, faults, folds etc. 

Manuscript needs to be improved. 

 

2. 

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 4 Report (New Reviewer)

I am surprised why authors did not make required changes? Also, did not respond my queries well. I could not find the response. Also, I could not see any edits except slight addition to discussion part. 

Author Response

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Round 3

Reviewer 4 Report (New Reviewer)

Please check the English once again

Author Response

We carefully revise all the English expressions in the manuscript.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Some modifications/corrections are given below:

Title, abstract and keywords

Line 15 Earthquakes before 1949 were not studied so you should change “…since the founding of China” for “since 1949”

Some deathly EQs happened before the founding of China (David L. Olson & Desheng Dash Wu (2010) Earthquakes and Risk Management in China, Human and Ecological Risk Assessment, 16:3, 478-493 or Xu, Y., He, H., Deng, Q., Allen, M. B.,Sun, H., & Bi, L. (2018). The CE1303 Hongdong earthquake and the Huoshan Piedmont Fault, ShanxiGraben: Implications for magnitudelimits of normal fault earthquakes. Journal of Geophysical Research: SolidEarth,123, 3098–3121)

Line 25 How can the results serve as a reference for rapid decision-making of EQ emergency?

I do not think that your results provide a reference for rapid decision-making of EQ emergency (line 268-270). There is not a specific analysis of losses by location or intensity.

Section 1

I am still missing some more references

Fig. 2c and 2d. Why did you not represent Ms≥5 and ≥6?

It would be better to use the same Y-axes scales for fig. 2c and 2d. Caption of fig 2 should be “…(black) and number of earthquakes…” for c and d

2000-2010 decade shows less number of EQs M≥6 and M≥7 than 1970-1980 decade, however the number of fatalities and injuries is similar. Probably that it is because the depth or the location of the events (far from populated areas). Could you explain it in the text? You should consider how you could plot them in order to improve your paper.

Better to use ≥ than >= (in all figures and text)

According to fig. 2c the number of EQs was 29 but the list in table 1 shows 23. What do typical EQs mean? I read that 2 M<8 EQs caused no casualties, so I supposed the missing 4 EQs did not cause casualties.

Fig. 3. Why do not use the same numbers than in table 1 to represent the 23 EQs? I would also plot the 21 M6-7 EQs

Fig. 4 Could you explain (in terms, for example, of depth or population exposed) why more than 50 fatalities happened by 3 M5-6 EQs and around 10 fatalities or less by 3 M7-8 EQs? You should re-write the caption.

Section 3.1.3

As expected, there are no significant seasonal patterns. However, according to fig.7 and table 3, there is probably a relationship between magnitude and fatalities. I am sure that fatalities can be also explained considering distance to populations or depth

Fig. 7 You should re-write the caption..

Fig. 10 and 12 You should re-write the captions.

Section 4

Some more outcomes could be obtained from the research if authors would have discussed about the different relationships among casualties, socioeconomic losses, intensity, magnitude, population near to the epicenter, time of occurrence or depth. Despite the paper is dealing with socioeconomic losses the authors have mainly focused on casualties (fig. 2, 3, 4, 6, 7,10, 11,12 and tables 2 and 3). Just table 1 is dealing with economic looses.

They should try to explain the most significant “anomalous data” (in my previous comments I pointed out some of them), including those related to economic losses.

I consider that the paper should deepen in the analysis of the different plots shown.

Line 268-270 I do not think that your results provide a reference for rapid decision-making of EQ emergency. There is not a specific analysis of losses by location or intensity.

 

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript lacks motivation and it is not very clear the purpose or contribution of this paper. A clearer focus on what the authors intend to do with this paper must be outlined.

The article has a very low level of originality. The abstract is concise, but it offers information on the remaining part of the article. The introduction requires the completion of the theoretical aspects. Please add some reference titles, especially in the introductory, more general part, where the generous international literature can be used. Are there any similar studies that can be referenced in the introductory part? The methodology does not use innovative models or tools. The results are poorly discussed and they should be more thoroughly analyzed. The conclusions are not so relevant, so please revise them.

The manuscript needs a rigorous check of the English language. And also, some sentences are confusing and should be rewritten.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

This paper deals with a spatiotemporal analysis of earthquake events and their losses in China from 1949 to 2021. The authors have studied the number of earthquakes and the respective losses for decades from the 1950s to the 2010s. They also have studied fatalities, injuries, magnitude, seasonality, spatial distribution, and earthquake depth. Despite the large number of features studied, there is a lack of scientific findings. The work seems to be a "report" of earthquake occurrences in China Mainland during the period analyzed. It is unclear what benefits the present work offers to the scientific community. Several examples from those statements are detailed below.

 

• The first two points that draw our attention are the high number of citations from the first author Tongyan Zheng, and that several papers cited by the authors are written in Chinese, which makes it impossible to read for a non-speaker.

• By the body text, it seems the authors had excluded earthquakes that occurred outside the Chinese mainland, even when those earthquakes were felt in the Chinese mainland. However, the authors do not provide more details about how many earthquakes were excluded and why they have been done this way.

• The authors stated that they "used ArcGis 10.5 to edit the attributes". However, there is no detail about what this "editing of attributes" is, nor what is the purpose this.

• In the text, the authors state that they used statistical methods to quantify the spatiotemporal distribution of earthquakes and their losses, citing reference work 35. However, the study carried out in [35] uses statistical methods utterly different from those used in the present work. In [35], the authors analyze successive earthquakes using Non-extensive Statistical Mechanics methods, which were not used here.

• Figure 1 shows the frequency distribution of earthquake magnitudes. Between the magnitudes 5 and 8, the distribution is expected to obey the Gutenberg-Richter law (GR). However, the authors do not mention this fact. Furthermore, the value found for the “b-value” of the GR law was 0.7, which is very different from the usual value, which is generally close to 1.0. Another point is that the decreasing line found in this graph is not a linear distribution, as pointed out in the text, but an exponential one (as described by GR's law), since the vertical axis is logarithmic.

• Figure 2:

 1- What are the magnitudes considered?

 2- It is the annual average, right? The name must be corrected.

 3- The measurement precision in all decades are the same? Would all the earthquakes detected in recent decades also be detected in the previous?

 4- It is hard to say that the annual number of earthquakes increased from 3 to 11 since all cases' error margins are high. In the 2000s, for example, varied from approximately 3 to 18.

5- Other problems in axes and units…

 

• Sections 3.1.2 to 3.2.2 show a succession of data without giving analyzes that allow obtaining results with relevant scientific conclusions. The plots present data that do not allow obtaining correlations or functions that describe the behavior of the analyzed feature.

• The authors state that “economic losses caused by earthquakes have reached an annual average of $2.619 billion in the last 10 years, and the number of casualties has been effectively controlled”. It could be a good result, despite being a bit intuitive. However, how the “economic losses” could be compared for different decades wasn't explained. US$1,00 in the 1950s has a higher “purchasing power” than in the 2000s. 

• Throughout the text, are making statements such as "The average earthquake depths of the six blocks in Chinese mainland show a decreasing trend 258 from west to east". However, throughout the paper, seismological aspects of the considered region are not discussed. The seismological aspects of the region would be important to carry out a discussion of these results and their interpretation.

• It is pointed out as results of this paper that "Larger magnitudes, shallow hipocenters, and high population density locations produce more casualties." However, these results are widely known in the literature.

• The Discussion and Conclusions parts are compilations of the results presented in the previous sections. There is no discussion about the meaning of the results and their implications.

 

Given the notes made (other notes could be pointed out, but I think the ones presented here are enough), my opinion is that the present work does not have enough material to be published in Sustainability. In that way, unfortunately, I can not recommend its publication.

 

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