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NASA Quakesim Predicts 15 Out of 16 CA Quakes
Saint Aardvark writes "NASA's QuakeSim project has successfully predicted15 out of 16 of California's earthquakes with magnitude > 5, including 11 since the map was published in 2002. "So far, the technique has only missed one earthquake, a magnitude of 5.2, on June 15, 2004, under the ocean near San Clemente Island.""
I think it's a fair to ask how far in advance the quakes were predicted.
...it only predicts location, not WHEN the quakes will occur.
Still cool though.
So, have they predicted when California is going to fall into the ocean?
How many did it predict that never happened?
When they first started to try to predict tornados (right before they happened) a lot of people thought it was impossible, but they managed to do it. And this was before they had Doppler 8 million, just with changes in the pressure and such. A lot of people have tried to say predicting earthquakes will be impossible, but I think with enough research and data it will be as easy and predictable as tornados.
That means it won't be able to predict Quake IV :(
Do they have a multiplayer version of this? Will it run on Linux? ;)
fact is, though, this is a big step in the right direction. To successfully predict a quake, you need location, magnitude and time. They've got location down and time vaguely constrained (article doesn't state time effect, other than a quake in this location within 10 years) and a lower limit on magnitude (at least 5). That's better than nothing. and certainly something to use as a starting point for future modelling efforts.
Hmm, I can just really fanatically disturbed people trying to make Sims of the Bay Area in SimCity and then running Quake simulations to see if they can compare with the results from NASA...
*shudder* That thought was strangely appealling to me actually.
Seriously though, I all this prediction technology that exists and yet we still have no idea when Mt. Saint Helens will erupt again and to what extent. I wonder if we have "lava butterfles" that disturb prediction algorithms for earthquakes and volcano's? Or some equivalent therein.
Oops, how did this get here?
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From the blurb:
Following recent seismic activity in California and the threatened eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State. Forum takes a look at scientific advancements in the study of earthquakes and volcanoes.
Host: Michael Krasny
Guests:
I think they're triggering them. This calls for a tinfoil beanie the size of California.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
It's easy to "predict" something that you cause yourself.
/me puts on tinfoil hat.
I predit that I will put my tinfoil hat on!
Ooh, I must be psychic or something!
They're just putting their earthquake machines through the paces before they use it to ensure W's re-election, and to make a tidy profit for Haliburton, which owns a lot of soon-to-be-coastal property along the California-Nevada border.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
The article is vague. No mention of whether there were any false positives. People will get fed up really quickly if told to evacuate and no quake comes.
Also, it's not clear to me that what their predicting ("hotspots") is the same thing as predicting when an earthquake will happen. How long do individual "hotspots" exist in one place?
Still, earthquake and other Earth-sci prediction simulations can be useful. Just probably better for long-term planning than individual predictions.
I wouldn't exactly say they predicted these quakes. From what the article says, it seems like they just have a list of places where they say a >5 quake will occur between 2000 and 2010. Whoop-dee-fucking-doo. Anything under a 6 is less annoying to a Californian than a fly buzzing around your house. For anything over a 6.5 or so, being this accurate about WHERE the quake will occur is next to useless if you can't be more accurate about WHEN it will occur.
This is not meant to diminish the accomplishments of these researchers. I'm sure this is a very important stepping stone to greater advances. However, this won't be useful to most people until they can predict with much greater accuracy the magnitude of the quake and the timeframe in which it will occur.
Quakesim is obviously a typo of Maxis' new game [i]SimQuake[/i].
AFAIK it's a game where you control a Quake junkie. I've heard you get bonus points for getting the best mouse and mousepads but beware the "upgrade cycle" event which will dock your player some valuable dollars everytime a new version of Quake is released.
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Just as World Wind is starting to recover after we quite literally killed it's server (it was down all over the weekend due to /. related hardware failure) and is beginning the long, slow road to recovery, we turn the Slashdot spigot on the good folks at QuakeSim.
So it wasn't enough that we already Slashdotted the world, now we're going to end up causing an earthquake! Oh the humanity!
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
This sounds like a really cool endeavor, but why is this funded by NASA? NASA takes a lot of flak for using up lots of money and being a big administration, and its not surprising to see why with projects like this under its wings.
In the end, shouldn't such earthquake research be under a different organization?
The space unintentionally left unblank.
It's that time effect that's really got me worried. I'll admit, it's a step in the right direction, but 10 years seems a little fruity. It's fairly easy to point to a spot on a map of California and shout "There will be a quake here in ten years or less!" In fact, I think I can do this with a few different disasters...
There will be an Earthquake in Japan sometime in the next ten years!
There will be another Hurricane in Florida sometime in the next ten years!
There will be a volcano in Hawaii in the next ten years!
I'll need to change my underpants sometime in the next ten years!
Do you see how easy this is? Little step in the right direction, sure, but ten years is a damn long time.
"Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life."
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
int lat, lon;
for (lat = -90; lat <= 90; lat++)
for (lon = -180; lon <= 179; lon++)
printf("prediction: lat=%d +/- 0.5, lon=%d +/- 0.5\n", lat, lon);
}
The articles cites don't speak much on methodology beyond using historical data (since 1932) to predict areas where magnitude 5+ earthquakes are likely. It would be interesting to read about the methods and determine if they can predict larger (6 - 6.5+) damaging earthquakes of a larger magnitude. Or more significantly, earthquakes whose damage potential (as measured using the Mercalli scale) is high.
Geologists have been using historical data to predict future potential for many years. Stream flow data are used to predict flood potential; historic hurricane landfall data are used to predict beach erosion potential; lahar ages are used to predict volcanic mud flow damage potential.
What is more useful that merely predicting areas where magnitude 5+ earthquakes are likely to occur is predicting the frequency and areal extent of damage potential -- Mercalli intensity VIII +, roughly correlating to Richter magnitude 6.5+.
Then again, we Americans continue to rebuild on 100 year flood plains, hurricane-savaged barrier islands and earthquake-prone areas. The engineering geology I learned was to avoid areas where Mother Nature is going to win in the long run.
Murphy's law predicts that the one that will sink california is the 1 in 16 they miss.
-?-
I heard that Mexico City was using a quake-prediction system that warned the population about most quakes around 30 seconds before they happened. L.A. declined the technology because they figured that harm caused by the panic would outweigh the quake risk. There would be a fair amount of false alarms.
They figured the panic would cause more deaths and injuries than the small quakes and in big quakes 30 seconds is not enough to do anything about biggies anyhow.
Table-ized A.I.
The benefit that this provides isn't knowing when a quake will occur, but allow pre-planning to save lives by adjusting building codes to account for risk. Not all areas need the same level of structural integrity, and such research allows this to be used to save money in some areas, and lives in others.
Mind you I didn't read the article.
...But then again, who knows, maybe they did hype it up some time ago... however, this is the first I have heard of this effort.
But my point has nothing and everything to do with that.
As far as the field of "Earthquake Prediction" goes or any metric forecast for the fact of the matter, this is the first time I have heard of results before an announcement of intent.
And I wholeheartedly applaud that.
It's great to see an endeavor that "just does" without yapping it up to create the hype and controversy. Mind you, I understand it's NASA and thus publicly funded, but still, they rely upon Congressional approval for funding. I simply find it amazing to see this research performed under the radar until proven results were found. Such a course of conduct is quite admirable and after seeing hype after hype about other disperately related projects that talked up computational predictions of natural phenomena only to produce such an obscene amount of false positives as to be utterly useless.
Some people are working on an earthquake alert system that detects an earthquake at the epicenter and sends an wireless signal out to others. Because radio wave travel faster than ground waves, the alert reaches people seconds before the quake hits. Its not much of a warning, but it may be enough time to shut down some processes, park the heads on the disk drive, turn on the backup generator, etc.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
As a geologist, I do find the prospect of earthquake prediction quite exciting. I even worked a few doors down from Dr. Keilis-Borok (predicted Japan and San Simeon, failed prediction in Southern California) this summer at UCLA, doing some earthquake research.
0 5071107.htm
Dr. K-B's approach used statistical analysis and was quite an interesting idea. His paper even correlated some previous earthquakes (such as Landers and Northridge) using his "tail-wag-the-dog" method to try and verify his results.
Anyway, regarding these latest predictions by John Rundle and his team, I decided to read the paper. You can actually find it here.
I'm not understanding how they succesfully predicted certain things or how useful his theories are. They are saying they predicted three of the earthquakes that happened in Big Bear.
From what I am understanding, the way their method works is that it shows potential "hot spots" for earthquakes for the next 10 years. That means the whole Big Bear/San Bernardino Mountains area should show up as a hotspot on their map. This doesn't mean they have succesfully predicted all 3 earthquakes though if I understand this right. They predicted the potential for one M5.0 or greater there withing the next 10 years. The fact that there were three of them is just icing on the cake I suppose?
I also can't find any information that shows how many false-positives they nailed as well. This might be kind of hard since they won't know about false-positives until after their prediction period is up in 2010. Without that data though, we can't really be sure of how good this method works. And even if it misses some, it only reduces the chance of an earthquake happening in the next X years to some percentage (which we already have certain data for from the USGS. 67% chance of a M6.7 or greater striking the Bay Area before 2030 and an 80% chance of a M7.0 or greater striking Southern California before 2030).
Admitedly, if this method is promising, it might put better constraints on the data though, so we could say something like, "97% chance of an M7.0 striking within 10 years." However, this still won't help all that much in the scheme of things.
Additional information:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/10/0410
John Rundle's Paper
A successful "weak" quake prediction is defined as beating background probability. For example Southern California (Mohave desert to Mexican border) experiences slightly more than one M5 a year on average; or a M7 in 20 years. Even so, no prediction method method so far, except perhaps Rundle's, has achieved weak prediction.
However weak prediction is psychologically unsatisfactory for the public. They generally want to know damaging quakes (>M6) within a month in a county size area. This is a thousand times less probable than a successful weak prediction. Furthermore, the tornado and hurricane people found that the public will ignore severe weather prediction with less than a 20% probability of occuring in one day. It will take a lot of work to have successful strong predictions.
Mexico City is in a unique position - the killer quakes they have there often occur far away, but the crummy soil under the City has devastating effects for even distant quakes. So the idea is to detect a big but faraway quake and send advance notice to the City to duck, cover, pray, etc. Since the waves from the quaje travel at about the speed of sound it still takes seconds to minutes for the quake to arrive at the City. Similar systems are in use in Japan to do useful stuff like shut down natural gas pipelines, where even a few seconds notice can be useful.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"