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New Hope For Predicting Earthquakes
Kristina writes "Interviews with several geophysicists reveal that new data and new understandings about how earthquakes really happen inspire some hope in pursuing the short-term prediction of earthquakes. 'Much of the current work aims to decode how stress is distributed and redistributed far below the surface and among more than one fault in an area. Understanding that pattern could help scientists recognize when stress is setting the stage for a large quake.' This article goes into the latest ideas on what we know and don't know about when large earthquakes happen, and it talks with two Italian scientists about the large quake that hit central Italy in April."
If you can figure out when fatigued metal will break under a certain sheer force, that's approximately the same class of problem. It hasn't happened yet, AFAIK.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
But does it run on Linux?
Yes well, this is clearly your fantasy.
I recently heard an interesting question from someone on somethingawful. "What would an earthquake feel like from an airplane?" Curiously, the question went unanswered and I was wondering if any of you engineer types had a good answer.
Other than to satisfy our curiosity I have to wonder what the point is? What exactly would we do to prepare for an earthquake that we don't already do(such as construct sturdier buildings or educate people on places where it's a good idea to take cover)?
Unless predicting involves the exact time which doesn't seem to be the case and I doubt will ever be possible what exactly will we do with the knowledge that "it's coming, soonish"?
An interesting article. The upper continental crust deforms in a brittle manner and is amenable to modeling via Finite Element Analysis (FEA). For example McCloskey et al. (2005) used FEA to forecast an increased risk of a major earthquake on the Sumatra Subduction Zone immediately south-east of the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake, due to a massive build up of post-seismic stress. Sure enough, within weeks there was an 8.8 Mag earthquake in the right place.
It is possible today, and there are several other examples, where forecasts have predicted the location of increased seismic risk after a major earthquake. Large earthquakes radically change the crustal stress field, increasing the risk of earthquakes in specific areas surrounding the area of initial slip. Forecasts are useful in warning survivors and emergency workers of the location and risk of aftershocks following a major earthquake. But McCloskey et al. (2005) and Jeff McGuire are a special examples, as the structural geology of the Sumatran Subduction Zone and the East Pacific Rise are far simpler than the continental crust and were easy to model, unlike e.g. the North Anatolian fault, Turkey, where the same technique has been applied with less success.
But I agree with the article, the technique will improve when the accuracy of geological data improves. And just like weather forecasting, once we have higher resolution data earthquake forecasts will improve. We might forecast some foreshocks too one day, but that would need a dense array of instruments (I'm skeptical of electromagnetic effects preceding large earthquakes i.e. prediction). This will only ever be available in the US, Europe and Japan, it will never be a certain science and only applicable to certain fault zones. Lastly, the excessive skepticism by many in the geological community to earthquake forecasting annoys me, who are rightly skeptical of and mix it up with prediction. But this is not prediction, earthquake forecasting deserves to be accepted and researched.
McCloskey J, Nalbant SS, Steacy S (2005) Indonesian earthquake: Earthquake risk from co-seismic stress. Nature 434:291.