Earthquakes and Other Tectonic Disturbances Pose One of the Major Physical Threats to Civilisations Particularly in Developing Countries

The major factors to this will be looking at tectonic activity, the earthquakes they cause aswell as the distribution of these developing civilisations in order to ascertain whether the major threat to their final goal of civilisation is plausible or not.
Earthquakes are defined in the Oxford dictionary as: a sudden release of energy in the earth's crust or upper mantle; usually caused by movement along a fault plane or by volcanic activity and resulting in the generation of seismic waves which can be destructive.
Tectonic plates are defined as: A theory explaining the structure of the earth’s crust and many associated phenomena as resulting from the interaction of rigid lithospheric plates which move slowly over the underlying mantle; by the same dictionary.
Finally, civilisations are defined as: The process by which a society or place reaches an advanced stage of social development and organization.
The largest cities tend to be in developing countries due to the fact they have not yet reached stage 5 of the Demographic Transition Model and many of the pull factors that cause cities to grow still exist. MEDC’s tend to have reached a point whereby people move out of major cities in order to find a suitable environment for family life. Thus from this we can see that already LEDC’s are most at risk from tectonic activity. Earthquakes do more than just cause the ground to open up, for instance a Tsunami can be caused by an underwater earthquake; and the ground shaking causes soil liquefaction aswell as landslides – all of which are just as deadly.
Other problems come from the fact that settlements tend to grow around sites of major tectonic activity due to many physical factors such as the fertile land, rich mineral wealth