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I'm David O'Ronovich, welcome to the briefing room, the audio mind space where you, me and top experts, come together and inside 28 minutes wrangle a big issue.

Today, more than 40,000 people have died in Turkey and Syria after the powerful earthquake that hit the region last week.

An act of God, certainly.

But did this earthquake have to be quite so deadly?

The overused word devastated is for one entirely justified when applied to the aftermath of last week's earthquake in Turkey and Syria.

40,000 people are estimated to have died, mostly when the buildings in which they were sleeping collapsed upon them.

But how much of this suffering was inevitable, and how much avoidable had apartment blocks and houses been properly constructed?

And what does the disaster mean now for the politics of the region?

Step into the briefing room and together we'll find out.

Let's start with the science. Joining me in the briefing room is Stephen Hicks, a seismologist at the Specialist Earthquake and People Interaction Centre Research Unit at University College London.

Stephen Hakes, can I ask you what specifically physically happened with this earthquake?

Turkey is no stranger to large earthquakes.

Earth's outermost layers, so what we call the crust and upper part of the mantle,

are divided into tectonic plates around the world.

And where those plates kind of rub against each other or collides, those are where we expect the biggest

earthquakes. Now what's the sort of main driving force in the area of Turkey is that we have the

Arabian plate, basically the Arabian Peninsula with Saudi Arabian countries like this.

That plate is plowing northwards into Europe and Asia at a rate of about 11 millimeters per year,

so about the fraction at which our fingernails grow. But Turkey is getting in the way of that

collision and has to sort of escape westwards. And that escape is sort of accommodated along

two faults in the region in Turkey. One is

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