SCI/TECH: Earthquake prediction: Here. Now

Seismologists can now predict earthquakes within a several-month window. At the end they say that they aren't publishing their predictions. Personally I am really interested in what their predictions are. Hopefully they will do so at some point.

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www.wired.com...

Seismologists may soon have the ability to predict earthquakes several months in advance, say a team of researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The group announced Tuesday that it had used a newly developed technique to closely forecast major earthquakes in California and Japan last year, including the magnitude 6.5 tremor that struck Paso Robles, California, in December, and the magnitude 8.3 quake near Hokkaido, Japan, in September.

[Edited on 9-1-2004 by SkepticOverlord]

Interesting and believable.

There is a large scale project going on here in Canada that I just found out about in British Columbia and area of a major fault line that extends from Alaska down though California into Mexico and hell even into South America too!

They laid out many miles of fibre optic cables between the mainland and vancouver island and have it in a pattern like a tree branch. Apparently the fibre optics has some sort of device which can detect movement on the channel floor deep underwater and the collection of data from thousands of receptors fed to some large computer is used to detect low level seismic activity and to predict earthquakes too.

Hopefully it will work as a major quake was in that region a few hundred years ago wiping out native villages on the shore via tidal wave and a tsunami which was documented in history at that time also resulted from the same seismic energy on the shores of Japan.

I think that quake you referred to was like a 9.2. It was ENORMOUS, and another one is due from what I have read.

-P

Although th technique of predicting earthquakes is under continuous study, the cables you refer to sound suspiciously like seismic cables used in mapping the earth's structure. The cables would have been laid only temporarily to acquire data, although there do exist some long term passive arrays. The tree-arrangement is an array technique used to improve over the older technologies.
I will contact my colleagues and see if there is anything special going on out near Vancouver Island, but I would expect most seismic studies done in the area are either for shoreline development or minerals.
Using an extensive cable network for earthquake prediction is not economic (cheap alternatives exist), and sounds more along the lines of a "doodlebugger tale" told by field hands to keep the public away from the _expensive_ equipment

cheers

Ok, I understand why they wouldn't want to cause panic by publishing a prediction about an earthquake. Nobody desires total chaos and panic from people on that scale. But what the hell is the point in developing a way of predicting them if doing so doesn't do any good?? Is it just so these researchers can all sit around after it happens telling each other, "See, I told ya so! Now pay up!"

I mean why not just release the prediction, but make sure you include that it's only a prediction and may be completely wrong. Anyone who's been watching the weather man on the news all their lives knows that these types of predictions don't always pan out. It just seems stupid to waste time on the research if you're not going to use it. If these guys predict an earthquake and simply allow people to die and cities to crumble all the same, they serve no purpose. Let's use these guys for something useful instead.