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Deformation kinematics are a fundamental part of providing a comprehensive understanding of the development of the topography of an orogen. Along a compressive orogen with a single mountain range, critical wedge theory (e.g., Dahlen, 1990;Davis et al., 1983) has been often applied to explain the development of the deformation and the building of the topography. However, for orogens with a wider range, other deformation hypotheses have been proposed. For the northeastern Tibetan Plateau, based on a study of a sedimentation proxy in adjacent basins, the hypothesis was proposed that the entire orogen was uplifted synchronously (Bovet et al., 2009;Zhuang et al., 2011), with the kinematic characteristics of the distributed faults and folds being active since their onset (Figure 1a). This hypothesis is supported by evidence of a gradually decreasing crustal shortening rate across the range, based on decades of GPS measurements (G. Zheng et al., 2017;W. Zheng et al., 2013). Another end-member argument is that the deformation front is gradually propagating outwards (Cheng et al., 2019;Yin et al., 2002;Yuan et al., 2013), similar to the wedge theory, with the kinematic characteristics of the most active deformation occurring at the leading-edge fault, and the fault within the orogen being inactive or less active (Figure 1b). This is evidenced by a fast slip rate (Champagnac et al., 2010) and a high strain rate of shortening along the boundary fault (Zuza et al., 2016).The Qilian Orogen, located in the northeastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau, is composed of several NW-SE -trending parallel mountain ranges separated by thrust-fold systems; it has a width of ∼300 km from the Qaidam Basin to the Hexi Corridor. The uplift of this wide range is caused by the continuous extrusion of the Tibetan Plateau (

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On the tenth anniversary of the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake, investigating the evolution of disaster science is worthwhile and can be used to improve the future execution of disaster risk management. Based on more than 55,786 articles on the relative topic of “Disaster” derived from the Web of Science Core Collection from 1999–2017, this study employs CiteSpace and Google Earth to identify and visualize the spatial distribution of publications, bursts of keywords and categories, highly cited references, and interdisciplinary levels and then identify the emerging trends of disaster research over the past 20 years. The results show that the earthquake indeed jumpstarted a massive wave of disaster research around the world and increased international cooperation over the last decade. However, in terms of both the quantity and quality of publications in disaster research fields, China is lagging behind the U.S. and European countries. Moreover, although designing disaster prevention and mitigation strategies is a new popular field of disaster science, geological environment changes and geologic hazards triggered by earthquakes are more popular research topics than disaster emergency and recovery. In addition, the transdisciplinary level of disaster science increased after the earthquake. This interdisciplinary characteristic of disaster science gradually increased in popularity, which demonstrates that people can learn from catastrophes. These emerging trends could serve as a scientific basis to clearly understand disaster science progress over the last 20 years and provide a reference for rapidly identifying frontier issues in disaster science.

Tropical cyclones (TCs) can wreak havoc on the landscape and overwhelm communities. Since economic exposure is an important factor in damage function, an evaluation of economic exposure is essential because the characteristics of TC-related hazards are changing under accelerating economic development patterns. Here, we first reconstructed the wind and rainfall fields of historical TCs through an extensive database to extract the economic exposure to TC-prone areas on the mainland of China. We found that rainfall is an important factor in determining the affected extent of a TC event and that economic exposure will be misestimated when considering only the wind field. The results reveal that economic exposure to TCs has increased considerably from 1990 to 2015 and will continue to increase until the year 2100 under shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs). We found that 66.7% of China's gross domestic product [GDP; CNY 48.6 trillion (7.8 trillion U.S. dollars)] and 63.9% of China's asset value [CNY 139.5 trillion (22.4 trillion U.S. dollars)] were concentrated in TC-prone areas in 2015 and increased at an average annual rate of 10.6% and 13.9%, respectively. Projections of GDP scenarios under SSPs revealed continued growth in the early twentyfirst century, and the range of GDP and asset value in TC-prone areas by 2100 varied. Further detailed studies are needed to provide a detailed damage function for TC loss assessments under climate change and to consider how TC hazards will interact under changes in exposure and vulnerability related to economic development and social change.

Accurate exposure estimation is essential for seismic risk assessment. Recent rapid urbanization and economic growth in China have led to massive spatiotemporal changes in both the asset value and GDP exposed to seismic hazards. Using available GDP data, the asset value dataset produced by Wu et al (2014a) and spatial disaggregation technology, gridded maps of GDP and asset value are overlaid with the latest seismic map to investigate spatiotemporal changes in economic exposure in the most seismically hazardous areas (MSHAs) in China in 1990China in , 2000China in and 2010 We found that 15.4% of China's asset value and 14.1% of China's GDP were located in MSHAs in 2010, and the asset value and GDP exposed to MSHAs reached 15.9 trillion CNY and 6.2 trillion CNY, respectively, with average annual rates of increase of 14.4% and 11.3% over the two decades. The evidence of increased exposure provides valuable information regarding whom or what risk managers should give the most attention based on the economic exposure changes in earthquake-prone areas of China. Notably, the North China seismic belt, which is associated with the largest economic exposure to earthquakes and a rapidly increasing rate of economic exposure compared to those in other seismic belts, and the Qinghai-Tibet seismic belt, which has the highest earthquake occurrence, are two seismic belts of interest. A more detailed study is required to determine the relationship between increased economic exposure and earthquake disaster losses combined with hazard level and vulnerability. Environ. Res. Lett. 12 (2017) 034002

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