Much of the world's population lives on potentially shaky ground, scientists said after releasing the first map detailing the entire planet's earthquake hazard zones. Southern California, southeastern Hawaii, Turkey, Taiwan, Iceland and the India-China border are most likely to experience strong shaking in the future. The map, developed by 500 scientists over seven years, offers developing countries new information that can be used to update or establish building codes. Some nations in Africa, for example, never compiled such data.

"We can say today that as a result of this program, more than half the countries of the world have a new generation of seismic hazard maps," said Domenico Giardini of the Swiss Seismological Service in Zurich. As much as 15 percent of the planet's land is in zones of high or very high hazard, which is defined as a 10 percent chance or greater of violent shaking within the next 50 years, Shedlock said. Roughly 40 percent of the Earth's land is considered low hazard.

An earthquake with magnitude 6.8 jolted the main Philippine island of Luzon, including the country's capital, Manila, on Sunday at 2:03 a.m. and officials said one person died of heart attack and several were injured, Reuters reported. A number of buildings in Manila suffered minor damage, including cracks and shattered glass panels, police said. The quake knocked out power in parts of Manila and in several provinces of Luzon, the country's largest island with a population of about 40 million, about two-thirds of the national total, officials said. The quake was centred off the coast of Pangasinan province, about 180 km (112 miles) north of Manila.

The death and devastation caused by major earthquakes around the world can only worsen in the years to come, experts say, because more and more people are living near faults. With the global population estimated to surpass 6 billion this year, there are fewer unpopulated quake-prone areas. With ever more people to accommodate, there is more multistory construction in vulnerable fault zones as well.

As a result, destructive earthquakes such as those of the past several weeks "are the wave of the future," said Caltech seismic expert Kerry Sieh. "There are 40 cities of a million or more people within 100 kilometers of a major plate boundary, and all those are good candidates for a large event [quake]."

Moreover, some experts suggest that in recent decades the world has actually experienced a lull in the most severe earthquakes--those of magnitude 8.0 or greater. If so, even more destructive temblors are to be expected when the lull ends.

The disaster in Taiwan was the most recent in a series of damaging urban earthquakes in just over a decade. Devastating tremors killed at least 16,000 people during a 7.4 earthquake in Turkey in August. At least 143 people died during a 5.9 temblor in Athens several weeks later. More than 6,400 people died in a 1995 quake in Kobe, Japan. The 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles and the 1989 Loma Prieta temblor near San Francisco were among the most costly natural disasters in U.S. history.

The economic consequences of another major earthquake in the heart of Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay Area would be catastrophic. A magnitude 7.5 earthquake could cause as much as $50 billion in damage in the Bay Area and up to $250 billion in damage in the Los Angeles Basin. In Southern California, there are at least six major fault zones that could theoretically cause an earthquake as powerful as that which rocked Turkey. "Let's learn from [Turkey's] lesson," said Lucille M. Jones, the U.S. Geological Survey scientist in charge of Southern California. "It is easy for us to discount it as happening in some Third World country, and that is a dangerous attitude."

An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.9 on the Richter scale rocked southwestern Alaska on Monday afternoon, causing power outages in the town of Kodiak and light damage in Old Harbor, said the West Coast & Alaska Tsunami Warning Center. A spokesman for the center said the quake struck at 2:13 p.m. local time (6:13 p.m. EST) and was centered 65 miles southwest of Kodiak. The center said an aftershock with a magnitude of 5.3 occurred 9 minutes later in the same location.

An ocean-centered earthquake sent a giant wave crashing over parts of Pentecost Island in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu on Saturday, killing at least five people, local authorities said. Another four people remained missing. The tsunami was generated by a 7.1-magnitude earthquake, said Leiwa Pakoa, a spokeswoman for Vanuatu's National Disaster Management Office, in the capital, Port Vila. The offshore quake occurred about 1:10 a.m. Saturday and was felt on much of the archipelago's more than 80 islands, but the worst affected island was Pentecost, which has a population of about 12,000

One man died and six others were injured when a magnitude 5.5 earthquake struck eastern Turkey near the border of Georgia last Friday night. The fatality occurred in the city of Goresken.

More than 340 homes were damaged in a dozen communities by the shaking. A number of roads in rural areas also suffered damage.

Many frightened residents, fearful of returning to their homes, spent the night outdoors.

Turkey has been struggling to shelter hundreds of thousands of other survivors left homeless by two deadly earthquakes that struck in the northwest of the country during the past four months, killing at least 18,000 people.