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Earthquake Prediction Months In Advance
eegad writes "A UCLA seismologist named Vladimir Keilis-Borok claims earthquakes can be predicted months in advance. In the article at the University of California Newswire, he claims that the "team including experts of pattern recognition, geodynamics, seismology, chaos theory, statistical physics and public safety ... has developed algorithms to detect precursory earthquake patterns." It also says "the team's current predictions have not missed any earthquake, and have had its two most recent ones come to pass." They predict "an earthquake of at least magnitude 6.4 by Sept. 5, 2004, in a region that includes the southeastern portion of the Mojave Desert, and an area south of it." We'll see if they're right."
I mean, if they could narrow it down to +/- 3 (10?) days or something.. then maybe? But, really, I have a system of my own:
There will be an earthquake of at least 6.4 magnitude in the state of California. Before 2010. So far, my predictions have always been accurate +/- 7 years.
They got rid of the old guy with his knee that "acts up" right before an earthquake?
well, it's nothing one behind the ear wouldn't cure
So they can predict it X number of monthys in advance, but how many months does it take to finally let people know about it. If they can predict it 3 months in advance but takes 4 months to let anyone know about it, we are just going to hear a lot of, "well, yeah we knew it was going to happen"
While this is a great advance, the real deal will be when we get to the point we can predict precisely enough to WARN the people living in these areas.
As in, hey two weeks from friday, leave the area for a day or two.
Sent from your iPad.
months in advance, that is pretty far fetch. At best right now they can do like a day. I think the fact that they skipped predicting it by a week or so makes me less inclined to believe this. and predicting in september that like over half a year in advance.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
So about the first this this method of detecting them is ineffective, then they tell us that there were doubts about the %error that they would recieve from their measurements... oops forgot about that one, sorry mates.
Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day.
that if they published this information a bit earlier, or used the tech worldwide a bit earlier, lives could have been saved in Iran
They just can't seem to get their results to agree with the computer's results on that one inverted gamma factor
Still no cure for cancer
In June of 2003, this team predicted an earthquake of magnitude 6.4 or higher would strike within nine months in a 310-mile region of Central California whose southern part includes San Simeon, where a magnitude 6.5 earthquake struck on Dec. 22.
In July of 2003, the team predicted an earthquake in Japan of magnitude 7 or higher by Dec. 28, 2003, in a region that includes Hokkaido. A magnitude 8.1 earthquake struck Hokkaido on Sept. 25, 2003.
In 6-9 months there will be an earthquake within 310 miles of San Francisco of at least 4.0.
This is fun!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Oh by, big enough window?
I predict an earthquake by the end of 2010. Let's see if I'm right
Blogzine
USGS Earthquake Reference Site
Incidentally, I'm posting this because I want to test the load bearing of this server, one of the ones I take care of here at work. So click away.
(anon to avoid karma-whoring)
Coming soon to a TV near you: The earthquake channel! Get your 10 day seismic activity forecast!
clifgriffin > blog
I think they found a copy of CowboyNeal's itinerary and are making some educated guesses.
For years scientists have known about the signs that the faults give off before an earthquake occurs, but most scientist are skeptical that they'll ever be able to accurately predict them because there are so many environmental factors to consider. Read more on PBS's microsite called Savage Earth, The Restless Planet: Earthquakes. It talks about prediction and whatnot.
There's been other studies like this.
For example, 30-odd years ago, some school did research looking in newspapers of the last 30 days before an earthquake for missing dog reports. Their results showed a large increase right around the time an earthquake happened in the area of the quake.
Blogzine
He made an earthquake prediction in Japan based on radio waves, and he actually came pretty close. Close enough that his ideas are worth more investigation.
Dr. Elizabeth Rauscher was there, speaking about her ELF work and project HAARP. Interestingly, she claims a very accurate prediction rate, but I'm told that the US Navy asked her to quit that line of investigation (they use ELF for long-range comms)
C|N>K
...unless you'd care to back that one up with figures/a link?
Wow. Neat! It's incredible to see the strides forward that both meteorogical and seismic forecasters have made in the past 50 years. To crunch those kinds of numbers and actually predict the result accurately is very impressive.
What other fields are we going to be able to do full accurate predictions in? I'd imagine biological ones are a bit more random, but that's not my field...
If this turns out to be true, it would be a disaster for the economy in an area. Would you hang around or invest in a place where there's a big quake known to be coming in the next few months? It'd be like being told you've got a 100% chance of contracting cancer in the next few months. Although it helps you prepare, life can't be normal after that.
They predict "an earthquake of at least magnitude 6.4 by Sept. 5, 2004, in a region that includes the southeastern portion of the Mojave Desert, and an area south of it." We'll see if they're right.
C'mon schwartz.... c'mon schwartz!
To me it just seems as if mother nature should be left a little hard to predict...and maybe it's not necessarily a good thing to be able to predict things like this. Having almost full control over things could be bad. I think we really need to learn how to control global warming or something of the such before predicting earthquakes. I mean think of it this way...there is an earthquake, a few people die or what not and we use our money to reduce global warming more. OR we spend money on trying to predict something that won't matter in say 100 years cause global warming will have killed us anyways. Some priorities need set I believe.
Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day.
Seriously, I imagine if this sort of thing holds up, authorities will. Although this warning is so vague, it's only enough to get people to load up on emergency supplies, and possibly local governments to review disaster policies. Not that that accomplishment should be minimized, but something more certain a day in advance would be great.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
This Russian group first got attention in the US seismology community when it "predicted" the Loma Prieta (Silicon Valley) quake of 1989. The technique performs spatial-temporal statistical analysis of weaker earthquakes that proceed large quakes. The first President Bush even asked the US Geological Survey to look into this.
The method may work, but it has not yet passed the scientifically required of repoducibility by scientists outside the Russian research group. Several leading US seismologists have tried reproducing this analysis method without success. Either the method is devilishly difficult to reporduce, important details have [perhaps intentionally] not been published, or it really doesn't work. Furthemore, you dont see the US results in press, because people generally dont publish negative results. Hopefully the reproducibility issues will be resolved and there will be a successful prediction method.
(Read my lips: cold fusion)
People expect that earthquake prediction would be accurate to within a few hours, so that evacuations can be accomplished, while avoiding unneccessary evacuations. The trouble is, evacuations are expensive, have their own hazards, and it's going to be incredibly hard to choose the lesser evil of bad evacuation timing, versus the present practice of not evacuating and being unprepared for the quake.
What would really help is a preparation protocol that can be syncronized more accurately with risk. If an earthquake could be predicted with a graduated probability, then gradually more disruptive preparation steps could be taken as the risk rises.
There is no doubt in my mind that this is a breakthrough in earthquake science, and that the researchers who developed this so called "tail wags the dog" method should be congratulated for their achievement.
One thing bothers me, however. Okay, so we know that there's going to be an earthquake somewhere in the world. The question is, what can we do?
In an affluent country/county, with educated individuals and a well organized emergency response force, there are several things to be done. First, evacuation procedures are begun. Secondly, the rescue and medical teams can be put on standby. Many similar actions can be taken.
However, the vast majority of the world that experiences earthquakes with some consistency can't do quite as much with such foreknowledge. First, most of their buildings are not specially enhanced to survive earthquakes (witness Iran, an extreme case of unpreparedness I admit but it serves my pont). Secondly, the population is highly dense and these people don't necessarily comprehend the danger, making evacuation procedures much less effective. Thirdly, the emergency police/medical presence in such areas is pitiful. Finally, the state itself does not have the necessary resources to carry out effective measures - they have to wait until foreign aid pours in. Now, the question is, will the U.S. grant emergency aid to, say, Iraq, because someone predicted that an earthquake would occur? Not likely. And if they don't get the money, these emergency operations don't get underway in any meaningful manner.
It seems to me that the focus has been diverted from building the infrastructure necessary to cope with earthquakes (in terms of buildings as well as emergency care) to instead predicting them in advance. As I said, if predicting them won't do too much good, why are we concentrating more in that area than in the one that actually WILL make a difference.
Hell, its probably the same deal as with research in diseases. The people with the money to conduct research don't have the same priorities/problems as those for whom research could benefit most.
Maybe I'm just pessimistic.
This is the same seismologist whose methods were applied by American University professor Alan Lichtman in developing his "13 Keys to the Presidency". Lichtman has correctly predicted the outcome of the presidential popular vote for about the last 20 years using the resulting model.
It is apparently now possible to locate the epicenters of tiny earthquakes ("microquakes") that occur very often, and they found that these often occur in the same spot, which would tell us that that location is a place where no bigger Earthquake could happen, as the tension is released often.
Even if we assume that we can conclude the other way round (saying, if the microquakes cease for a while, the probability of a bigger quake right in that spot would rise - which is probably true sometimes), still there would be no information about when the bigger quake would occur or how much bigger it was.
Sure, one could estimate the energy buildup (maybe, in some way), but the time when the bigger quake happens is still unknown. Also, the absence of microquakes is just telling that no more of these are happening - noone can know if this is because tension is building up or if for some reason this place is now lubricated better and tends not to lock anymore.
What one would need is a reliable way to measure the tension underground, and still it wouldn't be possible to know when a big quake happens. It would give a result like "Uh this tension is really high. Better we leave right now and dont come back until the big quake happened."
So far, the only sensible protection against Earthquakes is either buildings that withstand earthquakes (or dont kill people when they collapse... well the first approach sure is favoured ;) or not building at all where quakes happen.
Here's my prediction: "somewhere on earth, before the end of time, the earth will have at least a 0.1-magnitude earthquake!"
The point is, that only claimed that that had no false negatives. But they didn't discuss another critical aspect: how many false positives they had, and how tight their specificity is.
Without those details, you miss a lot.
This all seems like a hoax to me, BUT... lets pretend for a moment that it is absolutely true.
If earthquake prediction became the norm, imagine the damage to local economies here in the US!
Imagine this scenario...
"Earthquake, 2 months from now, Seattle area".
Ok, what do you, a business owner, do? Pack up and get out. Hell, you've got 2 months to do it.
Ok, what do you, a would-be tourist on vacation, do? Pick an alternate destination.
Ok, what do you, a local citizen, do? Panic. Perhaps pack the family and leave. Perhaps stay and stockpile supplies if your employer hasn't left yet.
I think it's very obvious that natural disaster prediction would be devastating for local and regional economies. In the big picture, as local economies start their own self-destruction, it'll have a bigger effect on the nation as a whole.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Scientists have known about these advanced prediction techniques for decades...
Unfortunatly, the original research was destroyed in an earthquake in 1987.
How do we know this guy isn't some sort of evil arch villian with an earthquake machine? How?? Huh? How??
The results they got on their earthquake prediction methods, I'm guessing this is because all of the outcomes he predicted were something like "there will be a presidential election by November 15 2004 in which either a Democrat or a Republican will win".
Heisenberg be damned; the whole project has its own UP; that's why they are predicting, not reporting, an earthquake based on a mass of physical and statistical data.
Giving a value on the Richter scale is not really meaningfull. You can have a 7 earthquake doing almost no damage if it happens far below earth surface and big damage with a 4 one near the surface in a low developped country.
It all depends on where the earthquake takes place.
You should use an estimate on the Mercalli scale. I find it more relevant.
Richter scale is all about energy released, Mercalli scale is all about damage/lost of lives which really is what matters.
Iraq: war to save the U
One of my fondest memories from high school was Iben Browning's earthquake prediction. He claimed a massive earth quake was going to shake the New Madrid fault around 1990. See http://geology.about.com/library/weekly/aa030903a. htm. Several months before the predicted date we had a 4.x quake during school. Everyone thought this was clear evidence Browning's prediction would come true. The school board cancelled class for 2 days surrounding the predicted date. No earthquake ever occurred. He helped us out and made the merchants in our area who jacked up their prices rich.
I would like to call everyone's attention to the fact that this man is named "Vladimir Keilis-Borok". Hello?? Are people named Vladmir Keilis-Borok ever the good guys?? No! The only people named Vladmir Keilis-Borok have henchmen and big fluffy white cats and an underground lair containing an army of ninja earthquake robots.
Who remembers the San Jose earthquake back in the early 90s? who here knew that there was a conference on Seismology there that same day.
probably the same number of seismologist that knew an earth quake was coming.
BTW, the conference was cut short.
The most important prediction method is to antipicate the maximum horizontal force resulting from an earth quake. A force execeeding 10% the amout of earth's surface gravity, called a "g", at one Hertz can collapse a poorly designed building or overpass. 200% g is observed in the largest quakes. A guide to destruction in terms of "g" is here .
The United States Geological Survey has spent a lot of effort predicting maximum forces. this is based on the location of previous large earthquakes and local soil conditions among other factors. This has resulting in relatively low death rates of quakes of similar size. For example last month's central California quake and Iranian quakes were about the same size with death tolls of 3 and 30,000. Ditto 1994 Northridge and 1995 Kobe Japan with tolls of 55 and 6,000.
... randomly point at a map, and say that a quake will happen there, and the pray that they are right.
This signature was left intentionally blank.
So, how many of these recent major earthquakes did they know about, and just didn't tell any one?
I can't help but wonder, I mean tens of thousands of people died in Iran. Even if they weren't sure about the results, shouldn't they have told SOMEONE?
Isn't it a little early in the morning to be playing god?
You're bothered by magnitude 2 earthquakes?? *pfff* Newb.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Wow, I knew grep is powerful, but not that powerful;-)
I wonder what this might do to the insurance business. Lets say perhaps they predict a 7 or greater in LA in the next 4 months... Now a smart person living in that area would go beef up their earthquake or homeowners insurance (or buy some if they don't have it already).
But a smarter insurance company might decide not to sell any more quake insurance until after the deadline if you live in that area.
So now we know they are coming but can't do much to protect ourselves other than getting out of the area.
Apple free since 1990!
Even if they can predict a 6.5 earthquake to occur say during a 6-month period, this would make the situation worse since people would not go on as usual and would worry about an earthquake occuring during that period. I think people living in a seismogenic area should always be prepared for such a catastrophe.
you may find the Higgs in this signature.
" has developed algorithms to detect precursory earthquake "
Mine works surprisingly well:
int isEarthQuakeAnytimeSoon()
{
return (srand() % 2);
}
My track record shows that I'm right 50% of time!!!!!!
Note that this hypothesis "... has [been]submitted... to Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, a leading international journal in geophysics." I've seen similar theories that never get published because of reproducibility problems or other issues that get shot down during peer review.
Meterologists have found that people dont pay attention to tornado or hurricane predictions unless they are better than 30% accurate over a city-size area and couple hour time window (one day for hurricane). Too many false alarms are ignored.
An earthquake prediction is considered successful in the scientific sense if it beats background chance. (Backround chance is computed by counting space-time windows through seismic catalogs). Earthquakes are so rare, e.g. large ones in tens of thousnds of days in California, that large space-time window can beat chance. However, no one has published a reproducable methods for general earthquake prediction (ecuding aftershocks, maximum force, etc) that has eat chance.
I live in the Mojave desert. I am ready for it. Bring it on!
Reading the /. headline, you'd think that "scientists have learned how to predict earthquakes", but the glaring hole I'm seeing in the article is the absence of the a success rate. Sure, it "predicted" a couple of quakes, but how many false positives did it produce? How accurate were the predictions? Was it "a 95% chance of an earthquake between 4.5 and 4.6 magnitude within 100km of x? Was it "an unknown percent chance of an earthquake between 4.0 and 9.0(a really huge difference) "somewhere in California"?
This article is extremely vague about the accuracy or precision of the method, and limited to small test areas.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like us to be able to predict devastating earthquakes to help minimize casualties, but this is way too early to call it news.
This is a manual virus. Copy it to your sig and help me spread!
. . . who is on the TV while Angel gets his arm cut off with a chainsaw in Scarface?
-Peter
...and it's a press release, so there's not much actual information in there. Apparently, a chain of small quakes tends to precede larger ones, but I want to know whether the team has a model of why this is so. Matching patterns is the place to start, but saying "there's going be a quake between 5 and 6 on the Richter scale inside this 1000 mile radius within 9 months" is like saying "there's going to be a blizzard that drops between 6 and 12 inches of snow on New England this winter." You can get either of those predictions by watching long enough, but they don't have real value to people in the affected area. I hope the UCLA team is not working solely from observation, but has built or is working toward building a physical model that they can refine as they get more data.
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
I predict that:
I'll be more impressed if they can predict a quake on the less-active, but violent, New Madrid fault.
sigs, as if you care.
Arthue C. Clarke wrote a novel back in the early 90's called Richter 10 I believe, a genuinely disturbing look into earthquake and seismic event prediction, the methods were uncannily the same, maybe those pesky underworld crab people don't want to know something as the initial drafts due for publication were destroyed in a fire caused by an earthquake, make you think... or not
Have they got a precise idea of the exact hour it will be, then ?
I wouldn't like to miss my appointment with my astrologist
Is that insurers cut off issuing new policies once a disaster has been predicted. For example, when a hurricane is forecast to sweep through your area, they stop selling homeowner's insurance.
Disintegration cabins?
To take from the old economist joke, it sounds as if they will be considered successful if they predict at least 9 of the next 5 earthquakes.
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
What will happen to the GDP? All the destruction actually brings it up you know!
I can hardly wait to see that claim made!
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
If this turns out to be true, it would be a disaster for the economy in an area.
Bzzzt. Wrong. Thank you for playing. Not only would more accurate and more precise prediction of earthquakes reduce loss in the affected areas, it could potentially create a whole new tourist trade.
Have you ever felt the effects of an earthquake? I have, and it's pretty cool. The earth quakes. It's better than any roller coaster ever made. And I was in a mild 6.2.
Death and disaster is not cool. But what if predictions were good enough that could be sure to be in a safe area to 'view' the quake and not in the subway or driving across a bridge? Folks fly around the world to see eclipses. Don't you think folks would hop on a plane for a reasonably sure shot at being in a quake?
Sure, if you like big surprises and chaos and destruction, better quake predictions are a buzz kill. But other than that, what is the downside? Would you rather have a report today saying you're going to get cancer in 6 months, or a report in a year saying you just died of cancer?
What's really informative about all of these models is that they pretend to model chaotic events. The lessons taught by Dr Lorenz fall on greedy ears.
They can go around predicting earthquakes, but miss just one and their creditbility, and funding, dry up. And miss one they will. These boys need to move their focus to modeling ground water movements. There's government money to be made doing that, or you can supress property rights or free enterprise, and no one will get a chance to criticize your work because the government and the biggest special interest groups are behind it. So, how do you avoid the strange attractor and arrive at previously determined conclusions? Simple. You use the big, second order differential equations as eye candy to blind the ignorant, then you substitute linear equations, disguised with a lot of greek letters, super and subscripts, amid a flood of jargon. Then you run your model backwards! Yup! You start with your desired conclusion and run your model backward to a set a 'inputs', adjusting co-efficients along the way to help out. It doesn't take long to find those 'inputs' in the huge pile of 'data' you've collected. That makes it easy to avoid the insensitivity, nonuniqueness and instability that is common in non-linear systems. Non-linear? That's what the atmosphere, ground water and earth movements are. That they could be accurately and fairly modeled by what are essentially y=mx+b (linear) equations is foolish, if not dishonest.
http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~ldb/seminar/butterfly.h
Of course, that doesn't stop some people from claiming that all they need to do to circumvent Chaos is discover more 'accurate' models. These folks also while away the hours inventing perpetual motion machines or over-unity power sources. Why not? They spent the better part of 50 years writing papers based on the Piltdown Man. http://www.clarku.edu/~piltdown/pp_map.html
And what did they do after the hoax was discovered? They claimed they knew it was a hoax all along! In the meantime, over 500 'learned' papers were written using the Piltdown Man as proof of all sorts of Evolutionary theories. Who knows how many Doctorates were handed out on the basis of that scam. But, who cares? Lots of grants were given, salaries funded and careers made using those phony bones. The scams are the same, the bones have changed.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
It's an earthquake generating machine, but that would be too contraversial. So they just claim that they can predict them, and make sure they happen when they said, and look like heroes!
Unfortunately, this will stop the earth's core from spinning...
My other sig is extremely clever...
If they haven't missed any, and they predicted the last two, they must be predicting at a vast rate. Last December, there were three earthquakes which made international news, in California, Iran and Indonesia.
My prediction (without being a scientist and without funding):
Between now and Dec '04, SCO will release another press release
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
They think they are so wise in the ways of science. Everyone knows that you can prevent earthquakes using sheeps' bladders.
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
...I know the earth moved for you.
He gets them right quite often (but that can be debated).
Even if this is true (doubtful to me, but I am NOT an expert), it's totally irrellevant.
The problem is idiots keep building massive structures over PROVEN ACTIVE faults. Even after whole cities are destroyed MANY TIMES OVER the lemmings among us rebuild. Look at Baam in Iran. This anchient city has been flattened and rebuilt on a regular basis. I don't speak the local language, but where did they get the name "Bam"???? from eyewitnesses to the FIRST QUAKE????? Another example is California, which is proof that God IS NOT blessing the USA. Why do I say that? Obviously He is upset at the way we treated the Mexicans, THAT is why the state has not broken off and sunk into the sea like the psychics have predicted in the grocery store rags every year. The only solution is to give it back to mexico, remove all evidence of white oppression like industry, moving the entire economy east, and after mexico moves in and God's grace is restored California will sink and we can rebuild the San Fransisco naval docks in Nevada thereby bringing a sufficient source of water to the great american desert.
By the way, if you think this is anything other than pushing the probable results of this study to an absolutely absurd conclusion you need to go back to getting your scientific evidence of batboy from the grocery store rags, lighten up and smile, there are too many people who forgot how.
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
Predicting earthquakes is easy. I'd like to see them predict the release date for Doom 3. Then I'll be impressed.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Ditto for hurricanes, floods, blizzards, fires, tornadoes, drought ....
You remind me of my brother. Pisses and moans about paying for hurricane victims in Florida, then wanted a dam built to protect his house from a 100 year flood that he bought knowing it was in a flood plain.
Infuriate left and right
we can't accurately predict /. dupes.
What kind of emergency was this, again? A booty call?
True story.
Bzzzt. Wrong. Thank you for playing.
There's a huge difference between knowing an earthquake is likely to occur soon and knowing it will occur next month, or next year, or...
Human psychology allows us to live with potential disaster, but rejects certain disaster. Yep, huge financial dislocations will occur when earthquake predictions become more reliable. Business will withdraw capital, and it goes downhill from there.
And, like, tourism? *Snort*. Relatively few people would show up, even if allowed. And would you willingly put yourself in an area that will shortly be without food, water, shelter, or transportation out?
Are you that stupid?
This was already reported by Wired News: Predicting the Next Big One
It seems to me that they are giving themselves a six month window, as in the earthquake will happen between now and Sept 5. How is that going to help the people that live there? I can't quit my job, go on vacation for six months and then go back. I need to know a week or so in advance so I can leave right before, and come back right after.
I understand how this can help with the logistics of preparing aid. However, since a lot of earthquakes happen on major fault lines, couldn't you save the scientists time and just bring the aid to cities say 100 km from these sites.
I've seen aerial photos of LA in my earth sciences class, and had to laugh. You could see the fault line going through the city. You could also see right on the fault line, a huge cloverleaf onramp, elementary and secondary school, fire dept, earthquake response, and hospital. Now I know you want to be close to the problem, but you don't want to become the problem!
Please don't put any more fire depts. on the fault, I'd like live fireman to put out the fires and rescue me, signed Joe Los Angelian.
I was near the recent California quake. If I had known it was going to be a 6.5, at that exact date and time, well, I would have packed up the family and spent the day in Santa Barbara. Probably would have taken all the pictures and valuables off the shelves, put them away safely, and had my car been up on jackstands (as it often is :(. . .) I would have put it back on the ground.
:)
Probably would have stocked up on batteries - maybe even splurged and bought a diesel generator. Bottled water too. Definately. (a few broken water mains around here - Paso Robles has a ruptured municipal water storage tank, so everybody there will have to cut back for a few months).
If I worked in a high-rise, I absolutely would not have gone to work that day.
On the other hand, if they can't give a precise time of the event, or magnitude, that's less useful. I mean, if it could have been a much stronger quake, I would definately have bought earthquake insurance.
I would have taken down the shelving units in my garage, next to my car. (in addition to all the other stuff), and maybe even get some structural reinforcement done to my home.
But with a vague event time, I might have actually gone to work (assuming I worked in a high-rise) -
so accuracy is a very important factor. If they gave like a two month window for the event, I could imagine something like that could be absolutely devestating, economically. Businesses would shut down. People would leave. Just on the possibility that it could be an 8.0 at any given time. If I wasn't convinced that a strong quake weren't unlikely, I don't think I'd stay here.
This 6.5 was "the big one" for the next 50 years or so. I'll trade that for Tornadoes any day.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
If these scientists really want attention they will have to release their predictions using vague and eery language.
For Mojave: "Beneath the sands in the month of Labor a great movement will startle those not of the slashed dot"
Even better if they did this on television wearing period clothing and staring into a crystal ball or caldron of some sort. It could be quite dramatic.
Apparently the answer is Yes. California--with the earthquakes, fires, mud slides, Bonos and Schwarzeneggers --is the most populous state in the union. So people do hang around despite imminent doom.
Bosh. There's an enormous difference between "maybe" there'll be an earthquake and "definitely." While there might not be a mass out-migration, people will be reluctant to build, start new businesses, visit as tourists, buy stocks in businesses based in the region, issue insurance, etc. We've become a world of wimps put off by the least whiff of risk. Look at the over-reaction to the single Mad Cow we've found in the U.S. You think the kind of people who panic over the infinitesimal chance of getting a bad burger are going to suddenly develop a spine when it comes to an earthquake? I don't. People can and do remain serene when the risk is ambiguous and abstract, but they'll lose their minds when it's no longer an abstraction.
Just about any University in a seismically active country, has at least one team or a scientist claiming to have created/discovered an x% accurate method of predicting when, where and how earthquakes will happen.
Unfortunately either that x is too low, or the method questioned, or worse discredited, by fellow seismologists.
You see this field of science is quite possibly the one where most backstabbing for funding takes place. The stakes are very high and so is the money and the fame if someone gets it right.
Right now, the world's most advanced state in seismic/disaster protection and planning, Japan, is looking at at least 3 schemes I've heard of...
So the question is. What's so special about just another possibly valuable, higly unlikely to be accurate prediction scheme?
/. Where the truth
If you can predict earthquakes accurately enough then you can model them. If you can model them then maybe you can find a way to release a few smaller earth quakes rather than wait for the large earthquake.
Earthquakes are after all about relieving pent up pressure between the plates. I don't know how you could do it, but they might find a way to releive that pressure before a big quake is needed to release it. If you have three months warning, that might be enough to plan for and execute a pressure release!
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
he signed out a copy of Nostradamus's predictions from the library.
Nothing else could be so vague, yet have the copious ability to be twisted to fit your event.
Depending on the geographic situation, there can be seconds to minutes for the most descruction seismic waves to hit you (surface waves travel about 3 miles a second). That might give you enough time to shut down computers, natural gas feeds, subways, etc. A conference last month reviewed progress in this area. Mexico probably has the best situation because its west coast quakes take about six minutes to reach Mexico City which has been mostly constructed on "mud". Southern California is less lucky, because it can be right over the quake. Japan and Taiwan are inbetween with cities about a minute from major faults. The Mexican system even puts text warn on TV like tornado reports, according to the abstract.
The traditional alarm methods listen to several stations in order to block out non-earthquake events and triangulate the location. But this takes 2-5 minutes waiting for enough information. Some research is going towards single-station, first couple second analysis, which may be useful for Los Angeles.
Yup.. My cat's activing weird - must be an earthquake coming....
Bill Stewart
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Yes. Because they do. No, it doesn't make sense.
There's an enormous difference between "maybe" there'll be an earthquake and "definitely."
There is no maybe about earthquakes and California. There will be an 8.0+ quake in the San Fran area. It'll make the 7.2 during the '89 World Series look like a minor tremor. It will happen "definitely." The only question is when. Could be next year; could be in a thousand years.
You may say the large uncertainly in timing allows people of psychologically avoid the certainly of the event, and you'd probably be right. But that does not validate the proposition that people or businesses will avoid the west coast when earthquake predictions become more reliable and the certainly of a quake becomes more immediate.
Let go back to the east coast. In fact that's a better example. In the US of A, areas subject to frequent earthquakes have construction designed to withstand those forces. Witness the fact that a 6.something quake hits California and half a dozen people die; a 6.something quake hits Iran or Turkey and tens of thousands of people die.
Hurricanes kill more people each year than earthquakes in the US of A. And we already have a predictor of hurricanes decades ahead of any technology for predicting earthquakes. It's called a calander.
There's a flippin' Hurricane Season! They came the same time of year, every year. They hit the same group of locations, year after year. The exact dates and locations and storm intensities change, but all that variation is in a very narrow window compared to the uncertainly in predicting earthquakes.
So here we have a natural disaster. Causes more property damage and more deaths than earthquakes. Hurricanes not only follow a yearly pattern, but we can see them coming. We can literally see them coming days in advance with radar and weather satellites. If earthquake predictions will scare of folks, then certainly the areas of the east coast subject to this yearly barrage of hurricanes are abandoned wastelands and uninhabited wilderness.
But they are not. Every year people die and houses are washed away. And every year people rebuild. There ya go. Q.E.D. Better earthquake predictions will not lead to a decline in population or business investment in the affected areas. Better earthquake predictions do not have a downside. (Unless, as I said previously, you like chaos and destruction. Then better earthquake predictions seriously suck.)
Imagine that I'm in an area subject to a prediction of this sort, and I want to *buy* earthquake insurance...
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that whatever methods used are not specific to trends of the seismic regions they studied (i.e. California).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I used the same idea in making my patented long-term weather forecasts -- for instance:
This year, expect alternating periods of wet and dry.
If I was told that, my reaction would be: Ahh! Oil! A big bomb! Or something like that.
But predicting the future (which is what you are suggseting)? If that ever happened, all information theory goes right out the window. Worlds would be destroyed on the conflict of interests versus availability of said knowledge.
Didn't you see/read "Paycheck" yet?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Oooh, did you watch "Jurassic Park" too?
Sheesh. Hey, guess what: we can model chaotic events. We can't model them well, but we can forecast the weather at least a few days in advance. Maybe we can forecast earthquakes a few hours, days, weeks, or months in advance: it depends on what timescale governs the characteristic onset of chaos. Just because a system is chaotic doesn't mean that we should throw up our hands and quit.
Chaotic system can be modelled as linear systems if you do so on a timescale smaller than that of the system, and you can go beyond linear and model the full nonlinear equations too, numerically. Since the systems are chaotic, you need exponentially better sensitivity to make a given improvement in prediction, but that doesn't mean that improvements aren't worth making. Throwing more computer power at the problem has led to better weather prediction, even if it isn't anywhere near perfect.
You may say the large uncertainly in timing allows people of psychologically avoid the certainly of the event, and you'd probably be right. But that does not validate the proposition that people or businesses will avoid the west coast when earthquake predictions become more reliable and the certainly of a quake becomes more immediate.
That's exactly my point. We all know we're going to die, but not the date, and that ambiguity is what allows us to go about our daily lives. If you know that you're going to kick it in 90 days, you're not going to go to work, avoid that high-fat food, put off that trip to Hawaii, or engage in a myriad of other behavioral changes that you otherwise wouldn't. Likewise, when certainty of a disaster becomes a given, people will change their behavior, to the detriment of the region where it's going to happen.
So, you're saying all of your big investors in businesses, real estate, etc. are only concerned about short-term deals? I think you're off your rocker. They're looking at the big picture, and you'd better believe they'd KILL to get that kind of advance knowledge if they're developing in quake-prone areas.
If you knew that a quake was hitting an area in 60 days that you were planning on developing, wouldn't you be GLAD so you could tell the general contractor to just wait it out?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
34RTH j00 n0w 03N3D!!!!!!!!
Your argument is pretty foolish. While there may be some negative sides to being able to predict the exact date of an earthquake, the benefits far outweigh the negatives (not just in terms of human lives). Markets have long thrived on sound and reliable information. Markets fear uncertainty/risk, the unknowable that's difficult to quantify, far more than anything. Sure, someone may not want to build in a particular spot if they know there's going to be an earthquake there a year later, but that's basically a good thing. If the business person thinks it's going to be net loss, then it probably will be. What's more, the investor has the opportunity to manage their risk, by choosing a superior location, enhancing the buildings strength, and so on. In fact, from a business point of view, an argument can be made that building before a known earthquake in a good location with good design could be beneficial, because the investor knows that the number of available buildings will decrease, i.e., less supply, thus making their offering more profitable. Likewise, for those people that fear earthquakes, California becomes a more attractive market when they can stear clear of any earth quake risk. I can also see insurance premiums being reduced, when re-insurers are better able to measure earthquake risks, the premiums are apt to be reduced on the aggregate (the more uncertainty, the more you pay). Likewise, politicians are going to be far-less reluctant to build up infrastructure when there's a known problem down the road that they will be blamed for if they don't fix it. What's more, when the earthquake passes, the economy is bound to rebound much more, when there's no chance of an earthquake occuring in the next, say, 20 years.
speed is okay though !
a land-buying, building frenzy. You'd have all your resources piled up prior to POUNCE at the oppurtunity presented afterwards.
I don't think the larger economy would be affected at all. It'd be a dip and spike.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
... your post seems to have little actual merit.
That's like saying, for example, that just because working perpetual motion machines haven't been made in the past doesn't mean they won't be made in the future.
No it's not. Predicting earthquakes is not known to be impossible, whereas perpetual motion machines are.
As far as weather, water and earth... energy inputs to those systems cannot be mapped to specific output results.... they are not deterministic! Small changes in inputs can result in wildly different outputs (insensitive to initial conditions), or a given input doesn't always give the same output (nonuniqueness) or the system goes into wild oscillations (instability).
This isn't true... the system is deterministic, disregarding quantum effects. It is chaotic, which means, as you said, that small changes can result in wildly different outputs. You also don't cite any evidence that earthquakes are highly chaotic. Given that many of the effects leading up to an earthquake take place on long timescales, chaos isn't so much of an issue as in weather prediction. Also, the amount of energy involved could make it like predicting a hurricane. You know there will be hurricanes in the Carribbean when the energy is there, and once one starts forming, you can tell approximately where it will hit. And unlike weather, the stress patterns that control earthquakes don't move much at all.
What's more of a problem is getting the data. It's hard to tell the stress on the rocks several miles beneath the surface, so a detailed model that allows computation of these stresses from other data is key.
If these people truely had the ability to create models which accurately predict the dynamics of chaotic systems they'd test them first in the stock market. That they don't says volumes.
Err? What are you talking about? You can't take a model for one chaotic system and port it to another, entirely dissimilar one (except for a few error-bounding theorems and the like). The forces in the market are entirely different from those under the earth, and modeling one does not mean you can model another. Furthermore, the market is a minority game, so any improvement in modeling has a tendency to cancel itself out as more people begin using it.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I predict that by February 2nd, 2004, I will have gone to at least 5 classes.
I predict that my roommate will eat the pack of chicken in the freezer by next week.
I predict that tomorrow will be cold and cloudy in Buffalo, and warm and sunny in San Diego.
I predict that I will run over at least one deer in my lifetime.
I predict that I will be going to sleep in the next 10 hours.
My point of this post? Anybody can predict anything that's likely to happen. Saying that there will be an earthquake in California in the next 6 months is like saying that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. If somebody's studied the plate tectonics in the area, one could determine whether there'll be an earthquake over a certain magnitude in that span of time. That's like saying I'll go to bed tonight, which is likely to be true, but not necessarily. Such "predictions" are not difficult stuff, and all it requires is intimate knowledge of the region and of the past history. We don't need a dedicated team of experts to do this, all we need is somebody with a lot of time on his (or her) hands, whose job is to specifically look for patterns and make general predictions. Now, if they could predict the month day, and time of an earthquake, and provide a good guesstimate on its magnitude, then I'd say that's something special. But such general predictions...predicting the weather for tomorrow is far more difficult, and only a handful of meteorologists are necessary to do this for any given region.
I think this is a waste of resources (manpower, money, etc.). Now, I don't want to flame anybody, but judging from the list of expertise given, I'd think it more likely that this project was contrived to do nothing more than give these people jobs or research opportunities.
grandparent poster is fairly clueless...
Well I do. I've grown up in Wellington, New Zealand, which is on a major fault line and expecting a significant chance of a big earthquake some time in the next 20 years. The city would originally have been built about 20 kms to the north, except in the mid-1800's, another big earthquake majorly changed the shape of the harbour, preventing big ships from getting to the other location and allowing them in here. You can walk down the main streets in the central business district and see plaques marking where the shoreline was in 1840.
You can't prevent an earthquake like this, but you can make a big effort to plan ahead for it. If everything's prepared for and especially if you were to know exactly where and when it's coming (which we currently don't), then why should it be a big problem for the economy?
For example, New Zealand has strict building codes that are designed to largely withstand big earthquakes. Large buildings are designed to be able to shift to a certain degree on their foundations as the ground moves underneath them, and tall buildings are designed to be able to sway in order to relieve stress.
We also know that the movement of the plate that the CBD is on is upwards rather than downwards, so at least it's not going to leave the CBD underwater, although the plate on the other side of the harbour is sliding underneath, so the people on that side of the harbour might not be so lucky with their property. That side of the harbour has significantly less development going on. People are trained to keep emergency kits handy, with canned food and fresh water. For decades now the schools have been training children about what to do in an earthquake and how to locate safe areas and structures. Civil defence is stationed in an area much further north which is a designated safe zone based on geophysical knowledge. The main concern at the moment are the roads in and out of the place, which so far have been expensive to build because of the surrounding hills and terrain... In an emergency, lots of people are going to want to temporarily get in and out, especially out.
Of course, if you think it's unusual living in an area expecting a big earthquake, then consider Auckland (800 kms north of here) where 1.5 million people live mingled around and in-between roughly 50 extinct volcanoes. (I hear the volcanic soil's a very high quality.)
The short story is that it's the nature of living in these places. People aren't going anywhere, so instead they do everything possible to prepare for it. The only difference with investments is that they should also invest in a bit of extra preparation, and experience so far shows that they do.
An even more accurate warning would, I'm sure, be welcome, as long as it were actually accurate. The economy moves with the people, and if it were accurately known that an earthquake were coming, people would either prepare locally or make temporary provisions to have their critical operations moved elsewhere... and then they would eventually come back again for the same reasons they were here before. Surely such preparations could only be good for the economy in general, since it's clearer what preparations are needed and when they're needed.
On the other hand, if it were known for certain that no earthquakes or volcanoes were going to hit in the upcoming years, we could stop wasting effort preparing for them needlessly.
[QUOTE] You think the kind of people who panic over the infinitesimal chance of getting a bad burger are going to suddenly develop a spine when it comes to an earthquake? I don't. People can and do remain serene when the risk is ambiguous and abstract, but they'll lose their minds when it's no longer an abstraction.
[/QUOTE]
I almost agree with you, except for the people I've actually observed. There are different levels of risk-taking out there, and some people are just certain that really bad things won't happen to them. And, other people are desperate enough that they are willing to take huge risks.
An example: my parents live just north of Houston. There is an area in their development that has been utterly flooded *twice* in the last decade. Houses have been condemned; people have had to sell at substantial loss. You might think that with that history, no one would buy or build in that area. Nope. There are re-built houses, right there, waiting for the next tropical storm to come through.
So I don't anticipate that better prediction of earthquakes will keep people in general from settling in certain areas.
However...insurance companies and mortgage companies *do* pay attention to this stuff. Their response to better prediction abilities will be to raise rates, as others have noted. Will this be good for anyone? I doubt it.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
you cannot see beyond yourself. You idiotically bother the Slashdot audience with claims that mix apples and oranges:
"Man HAS NO CONTROL over how much energy is put into these systems, even if he could measure them, and their models cannot reliability make any predictions as to the result of those inputs."
1. Man need not have control over how much energy is put "into these systems", because that's not the point. The point is to be able to predict not to control (influence) the systems.
2. "Even if he could measure them" -- you are arrogantly claiming one cannot measure those inputs, only because you think so. None of your arguments have been substantiated with anything different from your own allegations.
3. Learn to think out of the box. The fact that *you* **think** they cannot achieve desired reliablity proves that you would never make a true scientist.
team including experts of pattern recognition, geodynamics, seismology, chaos theory, statistical physics and public safety ... has developed algorithms to detect precursory earthquake patterns
Are the public safety experts there to help account for Murphy's Law?
The shareholder is always right.
Okay, an admission of stupidity here. I live in San Francisco and I don't have the complete 'Earthquake Preparedness' kit. I have a first aid kit, but nothing to handle broken bones. I have candles, but not enought. I don't have any bottled water, and I have almost no canned food.
I also occasionally go into buildings that are, as required by law, clearly marked as unsafe places to be during an earthquake. If I knew a big one was coming in some time in the next nine months, I would make damn sure I had everything I wouyld need. I would refrain from going into potentially dangerous buildings. I would also mentally rehearse what I would do if an earthquake happened.
Also, as other folks have noted, a warning might allow our emergency services a little time to prepare, if our bone-headed city government listened. If they didn't listen and prepare, and people died as a result, I'm sure the survivors would make sure those politicians never held office again.
The ability to predict, even in a vague sense, when and where major earthquakes will strike will save lives. It would also save money: if you knew an earthquake was likely in the next nine months, would you start construction on your new high rise, or would you wait a little while? Or maybe you were planning seismic retrofitting: 'sometime in the near future' and 'when we can afford it' would become 'right now,' woudn't they?
If these folks maintain their high prediction rate, we will probably start to see it affect insurance rates. If I ran an insurance company, and I knew that an earthquake of magnitude X in location Y would likely cause $Z millions of dollars in damages to my customers, I would offer the ones with risky buildings cash incentives to retrofit those buildings, and save some money.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
So, what happens if there'll be a 2 on the richter scale earthquake somewhere in the region? Will that be seen as proof that this is yet another correct prediction?
They have chosen a poor term saying that they can predict earthquakes. This is more like earthquake forecasting, just like weather forecasting. However they fail to mention the earthquake forecasting they did in the Parkfield, CA area that failed to produce a major earthquake after swarms of micro-quakes in the mid 1990's. Another problem is that reliable forecasting would mean that you would be able to say at this fault there is a strong reason to believe there will be a earthquake of such magnitude during a certain time period. The "Hey there are micro-quakes in S. California, so that means there will be a magnitude 6.0+ earthquake this year." shotgun approach is bad science. Of course, the funding for the Parkfield, CA experiment is up pretty soon so I'm sure that is weighing on their minds and they had to produce something saying that the study of micro-quakes could help forecast major earthquakes to persuade the money men to keep the money flowing.
An earthquake that would kill 50000 in Iran, would produce only 6 or 7 deaths in California.
The same earthquake in New York City would probably cause much more damage than it would even in Iran. Even though there has never been a large earthquake in New York City, it *is* possible. That's why I believe Californians have less to worry about from earthquakes than those on the east coast where building codes do not require anti-earthquake measures.
Eat at Joe's.