++ [ originally posted by mikhail
] ++
There's an interesting though skimpy summary on wikipdeia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_prediction
Found this elsewhere:
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake was the deadliest ever.
FICTION: Though well known, the magnitude 7.8 San Francisco earthquake and ensuring fire killed 3,000 and razed large sections of the city. It was the most deadly in U.S. history, but that doesn’t make it the worst the world has seen, by far.
The deadliest earthquake in recorded history struck Shensi province in China in 1556, killing about 830,000 people. The 1976 magnitude 7.8 earthquake which struck Tangshan, China killed somewhere between 250,000 and 800,000 people. In 2003, the magnitude 6.5 earthquake in Bam, Iran killed more than 40,000 people. The earthquake in Chile on May 22, 1960, is the strongest in the world with magnitude 9.5, and killed more than 4,000. For the record, the largest U.S. earthquake occurred on March 28, 1964, in Alaska. It was a magnitude 9.2 quake and took 131 lives.