Are Earthquakes and Natural Disasters Increasing?

Ask whether earthquakes are increasing and you will find a great many pages that answer yes without citing anything. The organisation that keeps the actual catalogue answers the question directly, and its answer is no.

Here is the short version. The United States Geological Survey says the number of earthquakes in its records has gone up because there are more instruments recording them, not because more earthquakes are happening. What has genuinely increased is our ability to detect small events, the speed at which news of any event reaches everyone, and the number of people living in places where a normal earthquake becomes a catastrophe. And the second half of the answer matters just as much: Jesus attached the phrase "the end is not yet" to this exact list.

What Jesus actually said

The list appears early in the Olivet Discourse, in the section usually called the birth pangs.

For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows. Matthew 24:7-8

Two verses earlier he had already ruled out the obvious inference. "And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet" (Matthew 24:6).

"The beginning of sorrows" translates arche odinon, literally "the beginning of birth pangs". The image is deliberate and it is worth sitting with. Labour pains are not a countdown that starts at zero and climbs. They are the normal, painful, recurring evidence that a process is under way. "Divers places" is simply the older English for "various places", from the Latin diversus, and it says the troubles will be scattered rather than concentrated.

So on the plainest reading of the text, this list is what Jesus said would characterise the period, and he explicitly said it was not the arrival of the end.

What the USGS actually says

The USGS publishes a page answering this question under the heading "Why are we having so many (or so few) earthquakes? Has naturally occurring earthquake activity been increasing?" Its answer is worth reporting precisely, because it is often overstated in both directions.

The USGS says its National Earthquake Information Center "now locates about 20,000 earthquakes around the globe each year, or approximately 55 per day". On the trend question it says the ComCat catalogue "contains an increasing number of earthquakes in recent years, not because there are more earthquakes, but because there are more seismic instruments and they are able to record more earthquakes".

For large events it gives a long-run baseline: "According to long-term records (since about 1900), we expect about 16 major earthquakes in any given year", meaning 15 in the magnitude 7 range and one at magnitude 8.0 or greater. It also notes that the yearly count bounces around that average, with 2010 producing 23 earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or above while 1988 and 1989 produced only 7 and 6.

The British Geological Survey reaches the same conclusion independently, putting the long-run average at about 15 magnitude 7 or greater per year, and noting that improved detection "mainly affects our ability to detect smaller earthquakes", because large ones were already being recorded a century ago.

Two things follow, and only two. There is no evidence in the seismic record of a rising rate of large earthquakes. There is also nothing in these statements that rules out a future change, or that says anything at all about God's purposes. The USGS is answering a question about instruments and catalogues, not about theology.

Why the perception of increase is so strong

The feeling that disasters are multiplying is real and it has causes that have nothing to do with whether the ground is moving more.

The last two are the ones that do real work. A magnitude 7 under empty ground in 1850 was a geological fact that almost nobody recorded. The same event under a city of four million is a global news story for a week. The human cost of a constant natural rate rises when more people, and more expensive buildings, sit on top of it.

What about disasters other than earthquakes

This is where honesty requires saying that the data is weaker, not stronger.

The main global record is EM-DAT, maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at UCLouvain. It holds tens of thousands of events going back to 1900, and it warns about its own limitations. EM-DAT notes that time biases result from unequal reporting quality and coverage over time, and it recommends that users be cautious about, or exclude, pre-2000 data when reading trends. Small events that would have gone unrecorded in 1930 are now logged reliably, which produces a rising line in the database that is partly an artefact of better record keeping.

Our World in Data, summarising these limitations, points out that the count of recorded disasters from 2000 onwards shows no clear upward trend, while stressing that this concerns the number of recorded events and not their intensity, and that it does not settle questions about particular hazard types.

Famine and disease are harder still. Deaths from famine over the twentieth century fell dramatically, while the reporting of smaller food crises improved. Pandemic records before the twentieth century are estimates built from fragmentary evidence. Anyone who gives you a confident century-by-century series for pestilence is giving you a reconstruction, not a measurement.

The plain statement is this: for large earthquakes there is good data and it shows no increase. For most other categories the record is not consistent enough over time to support a confident claim in either direction, and pages that assert one are going beyond what the sources can carry.

How the four views take the birth pangs

The disagreement between Christians here is not usually about seismology. It is about what kind of statement Matthew 24:7 is.

Preterists point to first-century evidence for each item: the famine under Claudius recorded in Acts 11:28, the earthquake at Pompeii in AD 62 and the wider seismic activity Tacitus and Josephus describe, and the unrest across the empire in the AD 60s. Futurists answer that the language of verses 21 and 29 is too large for that generation and that the list is meant to intensify toward an end that has not come. Historicists spread the same items across twenty centuries. Idealists say the list is a portrait of the age between the comings, which is why it has felt current to every generation of readers.

Notice that only one of those four readings requires the numbers to be climbing. Three of them are untouched by anything the USGS publishes.

Being fair to the person asking

If you find the news genuinely unsettling, that is not a failure of reasoning. Jesus spoke about these things to people who were about to live through them, and his instruction in verse 6 was "see that ye be not troubled", which is pastoral counsel rather than a data point.

It is also worth being honest that "the statistics show no increase" is not an argument against Christian eschatology, and no responsible reading of Matthew 24 was ever resting on a seismograph. Jesus did not say the earthquakes would get worse. He said they would happen, in various places, and that when they did, the end was not yet.

That distinction, between what the text says and what it is popularly assumed to say, runs through the whole chapter. The abomination of desolation and the signs in the sky both carry the same problem, and both are worth reading slowly, in order, with each view's case set out beside the others.