James Muirhead

I'm oversimplifying a bit, but it's one way to think about it.

And so Auckland is just further away than a lot of places in New Zealand to that margin.

But if you actually compare New Zealand to most places on Earth...

all of our towns and cities are actually close to a tectonic margin.

And so there's no reason that there's just a boundary where earthquakes are going to end because our country, in the end, as though we like to think it's quite big, it's actually quite small and it's very tectonically active.

Yeah, so what I like to say is that we should probably be alert but not alarmed.

We're collecting these data to get insights into how we should plan our cities, not so much how we should be worried about what's going to occur a week from now or a year from now in a lot of ways.

We want to think about, do we have good seismic strengthening for our city?

Is all of our critical infrastructure secured?

Just in the very unlikely event that this will happen.

In the end, I personally am not concerned on a day-to-day basis about an earthquake, but I am concerned when I think about the long term and the generational legacy that we leave to future generations is really what my concern is.

Yeah, we're working towards, hopefully over the next 10 years, to really get a good understanding of the likelihood, but I will say informally that it is very unlikely during our lifetime, but we do really need to think about future generations in our country and our city.

Yeah, so the next thing is for us to answer the question, are these fault lines active?

Of all the faults that have been identified around Auckland, the Mangatangi fault is actually the first fault line that we've ever got a radiometric data on to actually understand the exact timing of a movement on a fault line.

And so there are tens of fault lines around Auckland that need to be investigated to understand the

When was the last time that they moved?

Then also ask the question, how often did they move?

So that then we can get to this question that you asked before about what's the likelihood of future earthquakes in Auckland.

I don't think that we're overly prepared, that's for sure, I'd say.

The country has just changed its earthquake-prone building system and laws where parts of the country that are deemed as low risk do not have to have retrofitting of buildings that could be considered earthquake-prone.