Report Abuse. What you need to do is FAX me a copy of your drivers license and also your social security card and if possible any credit cards that you may use. This will enable me to vicariously live out my life using your name and also find out exactly what the meaning of the numbers on your license stand for.
Most quakes are unnoticeable by people on the surfacein fact, thousands of quakes occur every day around the globe, most of them too weak to be felt. Every year, scientific instruments detect about 500,000 quakes worldwide. People feel only a small fraction of those. On average, a magnitude 8 quake happens every year somewhere on Earth. But severe earthquakes that cause widespread destruction happen on average once every five years. These great quakes can destroy cities, burst dams, trigger volcanic eruptions, and set off landslides and giant sea waves.
It was only in 1885 that a seismograph in Europe detected an earthquake in Japan, and we have global coverage, even for very large events, only since 1900 or so. Below is a graph, based on USGS data, for the annual number of M=7.5 and M=8 earthquakes from 1900 to 2001. The high levels between 1900 and 1918 were real. The instruments might have overrated some events, but also it is still possible that some events were missed in those years.