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Scientist Forced To Remove Earthquake Prediction
Hugh Pickens writes to mention that Italian scientist Giampaolo Giuliani, a researcher at the National Physical Laboratory of Gran Sasso, recently gave warning about an earthquake that was to happen on March 29th of this year near L'Aquilla. Based on radon gas emissions and a series of observed tremors he tried to convince residents to evacuate, drawing much criticism from the city's mayor and others. Giuliani was forced to take down warnings he had posted on the internet. The researcher had said that a 'disastrous' earthquake would strike on March 29, but when it didn't, Guido Bertolaso, head of Italy's Civil Protection Agency, last week officially denounced Giuliani in court for false alarm. 'These imbeciles enjoy spreading false news,' Bertalaso was quoted as saying. 'Everyone knows that you can't predict earthquakes.' Giuliani, it turns out, was partially right. A much smaller seismic shift struck on the day he said it would, with the truly disastrous one arriving just one week later. 'Someone owes me an apology,' said Giuliani, who is also a resident of L'Aquila. 'The situation here is dramatic. I am devastated, but also angry.'"
The research put forward by Giuliani is from the 1980s and 1990s and was found to be completely unusable as a predictor. People make predictions of quakes all the time and some of those will be correct just by chance, which is likely the case here. Furthermore, finding correlation with radon does not mean it can be used as a predictor. You cannot evacuate cities for long periods just to find out that it was a false alarm.
That is heard quite often: "even with science, you can't..."
You know, some day we just might. Maybe not today, maybe never, but please, when someone who knows more than you about a certain topic warns you, listen!
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
This is almost as ironic as when Bobby Jindal (governor of Louisiana and one-time preznitial hopeful) mocked funds for volcano monitoring in the federal budget, and a week later an Alaskan (monitored) volcano blew up, with an orderly response since the eruption had been predicted for some time. Attention politicians: science is not negotiable. It's part of that reality thing not on your side.
Remain calm! All is well!
It is quite easy to predict that an earthquake will happen. However, what is the accuracy to the where, when, and intensity? If you do not have enough accuracy then you just create panic. The article says that Giuliani was partially right! So what? A broken watch is right twice a day, that does not make it a scientist.
you cant be right once and be believed,
you have to be right twice.
i look forward to any future seismic prediction technology.
complete with references.
of which this event will most likely be a hard data point.
Has anyone recorded earthquake prediction measurements and compared them? I would be curious to know which ones have been closest to the mark and on what frequency? I suspect different measurements are likely to be right some of the time, but not all the time, because the seismic triggers may vary from region to region.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Giuliani Mad!!!
Remember the Prophet units in the Empire Earth games? In ancient times they started out as religious shamans. But once you played up to modern times they were nutjobs wearing "The End Is Near!" sandwich boards. They could cause earthquakes.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
"Italy earthquake leaves 130 dead and scores more trapped under rubble" http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/06/italy-earthquake-victims I'd say being off by a week or so in this case isn't bad science at all.
Nonsense. He made the prediction using methods which have been proven to be unreliable. All the current research is against him, and there was no substantive reason to believe his claims had any merit.
Besides, he predicted an earthquake a full week ahead of the one that actually struck. What if he had been listened to and people evacuated? They'd have watched his day pass and started to wonder. They'd be sitting in hotel rooms, or with family members or friends, and thinking about the food rotting in their fridges and the money they're losing by not being at work. A huge number of them would certainly have returned to town by the time the actual quake struck, and the death toll would have been similar.
The problem here is not that someone here using poor science happened to be sort of right, the problem is that Italy is a country with high risks of earthquakes and exceedingly poor construction and preparation.
Building structures that won't collapse and crush everybody inside isn't trivial; but it is doable now
It was doable 600 years ago.
Just go visit Machu Picchu, and you'll see.
It lays abandoned for half a millennium in a land of frequent earthquakes, and it's walls are still intact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incan_architecture
factor 966971: 966971
It might be just my imagination, but whenever there is a large earthquake in one region of the Earth, there always seem to be two other earthquakes in longitudes +/-120 degrees from the original earthquake within a month. Does the shifting of the crust have any effect on the centre of gravity of rotation?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
let me tell you as a citizen, i would go to kick that mayor in the face.
Read radical news here
let me add according to http://www.earthquake.it/ultimi-terremoti.php it's since december that small earthquake are occurring in that zone, and they are still going, so it wasn't a single strike but rather the big one . giuliani predicted a devastating earthquake on 29 th of march in sulmona. the earthquake was yesterday in l'aquila, so one week later and 70 km far away from where giuliani predicted. Also he's not a scientist but a guy who work for infn which is nuclear physic and he's not even graduated. Civil Protection Agency looked to their data and with a pool of geophysics decided that there was not enough evidence to know if a big earthquake would strike and where would strike. they can't evacuate people just on assumptions of someone who already failed to predict that earthquake. however they were on "defcon 1" so when the earthquake striked they were ready to go for help as soon as possible. Yes building were inadequate because people tends to ignore that they live over seismic terrain and they prefer to look for a cheaper house without antiseismic structure so they have some money to enjoy their favourite soccer team on a big plasma screen. guess what they are enjoying now ... but this is their faul or rather a big darwing award for the whole zone.
Towns and even major city streets get shut down just to shoot a movie let alone risk of a catastrophe.