Just a week ago, about 50 earthquake and social scientists from around the world came to Kathmandu, Nepal, to figure out how to get this poor, congested, overdeveloped, shoddily built area to prepare better for the big one, a repeat of the 1934 temblor that leveled this city. They knew they were racing² the clock, but they didn't know when what they feared would strike. 

 

"It was sort of a nightmare waiting to happen," said seismologist James Jackson, head of the earth sciences department at the University of Cambridge in England. "Physically³ and geologically what happened is exactly what we thought would happen." 

 

But he didn't expect the massive quake that struck Saturday to happen so soon. The magnitude 7.8 earthquake killed more than 1,900 and counting and caused widespread destruction. 

 

"I was walking through that very area where that earthquake was and I thought at the very time that the area was heading for trouble," said Jackson, lead scientist for Earthquakes Without Frontiers, a group that tries to make Asia more able to bounce back from these disasters and was having the meeting.

点击收听单词发音