Abstract According to C. J. Gregory (1977) , Gregory had made two unsuccessful attempts to visit parts of South America, and each time Gregory said ‘an international disaster had stopped him, so he had better not arrange a visit a third time lest some cataclysm took place’, which it did, but of a personal nature. One of his reasons for retiring early was that it freed him to depart during the austral summer, but it was not until 1932 that he was able to organize a party to explore part of Peru. The intention was to make a reconnaissance of the main Andean range and determine the age of the rocks, especially the time when they were exhumed from the Pacific, to examine the structure of parts of the Peruvian coast, the geology of the desert belt between the coast and the western front of the Andes, to visit Inca ruins and to return by one of the headwaters of the Amazon and the Amazon through Brazil to a seaport on the Amazon. However, from surviving correspondence (in the author's possession) with one of Gregory's old students, William Quarrier Kennedy (1903–1979), it is clear Gregory was also hoping to bring some samples of the Andean volcanic rocks, probably typical andesites, for Kennedy who was working on establishing the primary igneous magmas. This was an arduous undertaking for a man of 68 years, whose last previous expedition had been nine years earlier.

Abstract An empirical fatality model for Indonesia has been developed by relating the macroseismic intensity to the fatality rate using compiled sub-district level fatality rate data and the numerically simulated ground-shaking intensity for four recent damaging events. The fatality rate data were compiled by collecting population and fatality statistics of the regions affected by the selected events. The ground-shaking intensity was numerically estimated by incorporating a finite-fault model of each event and local site conditions approximated by topographically based site amplifications. The macroseismic intensity distribution of each event was generated using ShakeMap software, combining a selected pair of ground motion prediction equations and ground motion to intensity conversion equations. The developed fatality model is a Bayesian generalized linear model in which the fatality rate is assumed to follow a mixture of Bernoulli and gamma distributions. The model was validated by calculating the fatalities in past events from the EXPO-CAT catalogue and comparing the estimates with the EXPO-CAT fatality records. Although the model can provide an estimate of the range of fatalities for future events, it needs ongoing refinement by the incorporation of additional fatality rate data from past and future events.