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Why Are We So Bad at Predicting Earthquakes? (telegraph.co.uk)
In the wake of major earthquakes in both Japan and Ecuador, one British newspaper asks: Why are we so bad at predicting earthquakes? In 2015 seismologists told Vice, "The more we study them, the harder they look to predict, and "there's a shortage of instrumenation." But today the Telegraph newspaper concludes that we actually have two problems: first, "science is hopeless at predicting earthquakes and, second, we keep building cities on major fault-lines..." They cite a new book called Earth-Shattering Events which reports that nearly half the world's large cities are in earthquake-prone areas, adding, "we don't just build our cities on fault-lines, we also tend to rebuild them, in the same place, but no more robust, time and time again." In 1976 one quake in China killed more than 750,000 people, while a 2004 quake in Indonesia killed 170,000. "The Earth will move and there's not a thing we can do to stop it," the Telegraph concludes, arguing that we need to learn more from our past.
Like the money used for research in predicting climate change (which can have global ramifications on the world energy market)
Because we haven't prosecuted enough scientists for failing to predict earthquakes. Italy is on the ball. Get with it, world!
Google says 250,000.
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Why don't we have the appropriate modeling? Because we do not have enough information to create those models.
Why don't we have the information to create the models? Because we do not explore the earth enough.
Most of the world's cities are vulnerable to at least one type of unpredictable natural disaster. The idea, of course, is that if you die during a disaster someone else gets your stuff. So let the urbanites eat cake.
Then we might as well start fracking again, right?
eom
I mean, what are you going to do, have everyone move houses and buildings to other locations? What a waste of time.
It is a standard question for the USGS: http://www.usgs.gov/faq/categories/9830/3278
It has largely be debunked by serious scientists: http://moho.ess.ucla.edu/~kagan/Geller_et_al_1997.pdf
Or if you believe this crap, what earthquake was this one again? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2645369/Author-claims-able-predict-earthquakes-says-one-U-S-July-12.html
We know where earthquakes will be - along fault lines. When will it happen? When the tension gets too high. It's like asking what pebble will start a landslide, what snowflake will start an avalance or what straw will break the camel's back. The problem isn't the lack of an answer, the problem is that we're expecting an exact result to a complex and chaotic process. Would you also like a map of where lighting is going to strike?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
here it's hard to see all the stored energy. Neither image sufficiently well on the large scale to satisfy the second-guessers, and imaging on the smallest scale is diminishing investment. Granted temp and precip forecasts have a pretty tight 90% confidence interval for 24 hours, and earthquakes aren't predicted like that, but you're chasing something that cannot be "seen" without fairly ornate technology.
Also, maybe stop poking holes in the ground and greasing the giant moveable rocks.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
"we don't just build our cities on fault-lines, we also tend to rebuild them, in the same place, but no more robust, time and time again."
I can't speak for everywhere, but in California, the construction standards are much higher after the 1989 earthquake.
Boston, however, is in serious danger because of so many tall buildings built of brick (and other reasons).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
IANAS.
Incomplete data and/or inaccurate data. Isn't that really the reason for anything we predict poorly? As the amount of data about any natural occuring event becomes more complete and accurate, our ability to predict continues to improve. I'm sure there is some point of diminishing returns, but with earthquakes and weather, we are far from that point.
criminally charged their scientists for not predicting a devastating earthquake. What kind of noise does a Fiat make when it gets a flat tire? Wop, wop, wop!
SuspiciousObservers.org
This is a group of independent scientists working on a theory that the sun actually triggers earthquakes.
NB; not the cause of the quakes, but the trigger.
"Hey, let's build a whole city *here*--on the *coast*--*BELOW SEA LEVEL*".
"Hey, we just got flooded out... Let's *REBUILD OUR CITY ON THE COAST BELOW SEA LEVEL...AGAIN!".
Floods: 3... and counting.
Lessons learned: 0.
Humans are dumb. Especially en mass.
The National Hurricane Center is reasonably good at projecting the paths of hurricanes but horrible at predicting their intensity and even worse at predicting how busy a season will be. The NWS is a bit better at predicting tornadic events but still lacks basic understanding about why certain mesocyclones produce tornadoes while others don't.
I still prefer nevr getting married in my life rather than joining the retarded S.t George interest group.
Don't want to risk jail for getting it wrong
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
All of those plus more TBD.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
http://www.suspicious0bservers...
Check 'em out if you're not familiar with their work.
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
we know the sort of geology that is found in earthquake areas, so we can predict where they will happen; by measuring strain, etc, we can get an idea of when they will happen and what sort of magnitude. The trouble is that we (== common people, non scientists) expect answers that fit in with my everyday rulers and clocks (ie a few miles and days), but geological events are measured differently: hundreds of miles and decades/centuries; so the margins of error are too great for what we want.
If I place a vase of roses outside on a summer's day I can expect the flowers to be visited by bees, but I cannot predict which flower will be visited first or the minute when the first bee will come.
There are some amazing technologies being developed at the moment by companies in California, some with state grants, that are likely to change that... Well, the short-term prediction part, anyway.
We "keep doing" this? Are there some newly-built cities we've intentionally located on major faults?
#DeleteChrome
i live in area that was devastated half a decade ago and i can tell you when you're world is torn to shreds, you need hope and you need to tell tragedy where to shove it. This is why we WILL rebuild. When it's all over, you can proudly declare that you cannot be defeated. #ClickThemLinks
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
That brings up an interesting question--what do we do about it?
"We've determined that on May 17, 2015, there will be a 6.0-level earthquake in San Francisco. We believe the accuracy of this prediction to be 90%."
Great! We've got a month's warning. It's going to be major. We're pretty sure it's going to happen--but there's a possibility that it won't.
Now what? Evacuate 800,000 people? Start building shelters that can withstand the earthquake? Do you tell people so that they can prepare?
...The same reason it is impossible for us to predict when/where crimes will happen ("pre-crime")
On the comparative scale of major cities of the world, San Francisco _is_ a newly-built city.
Given that a lot of its early growth was due to the California gold rush, gold being the sort of thing one finds more easily near a major fault,
It wouldn't be a stretch to say that it grew into a city specifically because of its location relative to the fault.
This is the reason why you find major cities over fault lines. Over time, people will tend to move to regions where wealth is being generated.
Tectonically active regions are where we find many wealth producing ore deposits lasting for generations.
Such regions may kill a few people (relatively speaking) every so many decades, but this is in trade for a decent livelihood for the survivors and their descendants.
Overall, we get a net benefit. This is why we keep doing this.
But humans are forgetful, and we don't like to think about negative consequences.
So every now and then we get an unpleasant surprise - and then we move on - and forget about the whole thing until the next time.
...in order to do something about them.
Suppose we could use something like fracking (for example) to release the stored energy in small, survivable doses rather than waiting for a huge, devastating earthquake?
To quote the late Sir Terry Pratchett: "After the fire, Morpork would be rebuilt with the traditional materials of wood and tarpaper.
It seems nobody here, including the author, has ever followed Dutchsince ( http://dutchsinse.com/ or his YouTube channel). He's a very knowledgable person who has dedicated his life to the tracking and forecasting of earthquakes (and other weather systems) with uncanny accuracy only to have been attacked and even threatened by official organizations. He's very down to earth and explains things very clearly. I can't understand why he receives the abuse that he does for tracking and accurately predicting earthquakes and such. I mean, watch him for a while, if you think he's way off, stop watching him. If you find he's credible, well then we can't say we have no way to accurately predict earthquakes. Decide for yourself. He obviously spooks the official organizations for some reason or he wouldn't draw so much attention from them.
It's easy to predict where earthquakes will happen because the seismic evidence is everywhere. Essentially most earthquakes can happen everywhere along the pacific ring of fire, and the most damaging quakes happen along plate boundaries, usually at the edge. So Okhotsk (Touhoku/Kamchatka), Alaska, Cascadia (Vancouver BC, Seattle, Washington, and Portland Oregon, see http://www.wired.com/2008/10/five-us-earthqu/ ), Nazca (Chile/Peru), are all going to be near M9.0 earthquakes every time they happen, but the time between each incident is a "tick-tock" effect
For example if you read the dates of the Cascadia quake, they are ticking downwards in roughly 300 year intervals, depends on which side ruptures. Nazca's has the narrowest tick-tock with 11 years at the soonest and 50 at the latest. Alaska (Pacific plate) alternates between Anchorage and Andreanof Islands also 7 to 50 years apart.
So if you do the math, the next megathrust Anchorage earthquake we are overdue for, since 2014, but may take as long as 2057.
The next Nazca earthquake is likely to happen by 2028, but may take until 2056
The next Okhotsk earthquake could be as soon as 5 years or as late as 50, but only half of these earthquakes occur in Japan, the other half affect the Kamchatka/Kuril Islands.
However Japan sits in the middle of two subduction systems, the Ohkotsk/Pacific plate which was responsible for the Tohoku earthquake, and the Philippine Plate which can't generate quite-as-large earthquakes because it's smaller. The latest Japanese earthquakes are along the Japan Median Tectonic Line, and is literately a "once every 30 years" prediction. But since these are also shallow, they do as much damage at M7 as the Megathrust quakes do at M8 50 miles away. The Tsunami from the Megathrust quakes as seen by the Tohoku quake actually does far more damage than the quake does.
So within the next 300 years, likely on 2140 or so we will see the next "most damaging quake in history" on the Cascadia fault, in the meantime there will be at least 6 M8+ earthquakes each at Nazca, Alaska and Othotsk.
However I will note. That the frequenty of small earthquakes often predict major quakes, and this is an easily demonstrable fact when you look at the earthquake history on all sides of the plate. In the case of the Pacific Ring of Fire, when pressure is released on one side of the plate, it takes a few years but a large quake will happen on the other side of the plate.
If you look at the direction of the fault lines along the Pacific plate, the first thing you'll notice is that the pacific plate is moving, or rather "rotating" towards Japan and Alaska, with Hawaii as the axis. This explains why Cascadia doesn't erupt more often, and why the San Francisco area isn't regularly hit with M9's. The plate boundaries aren't going under SF, but is a transform fault (San Andreas.) The Cascadia fault lines are megathrust, but the pressure appears to require a chain of events to happen.
So I wouldn't expect a Cascadia to rupture until a major earthquake pulls the San Andreas several meters at once. We don't actually know which will rupture first, but it's absolutely certain that one is going to follow the other in short succession. The 1906 SF earthquake didn't trigger a Cascadia earthquake, because the plate direction reversed for this event. That suggests that the next event should correlate with a Cascadia foreshock event if it moves in the forward direction.
Earthquakes are not easy to predict, but we know where they will happen, and we know how damaging they will be. The mystery question is how long between major quakes, since it can't be pinned down to a month, only decade-long windows. At some point we may desire to trigger these quakes manually at M5.0 so they don't cause any damage.
We have a pretty good gross understanding of where earthquakes are likely to happen, what kind of faulting will usually be involved, approximately how often, approximately what the maximum and typical sizes will be, and qualitatively where the shaking will be stronger and lighter. We can engineer around a lot of that, as long as we avoid building right on top of major faults, by making buildings and their contents stronger, which is one reason why a M4.5 at 10km is meh in California but damaging in OK. So far, we can't PREDICT even approximately when an earthquake will happen, though we can FORECAST the probability that an earthquake of size (x) will happen over some block of time.
Weather people don't PREDICT weather any farther than can be seen from the window or the radar, either - they FORECAST what will happen based on an informed combination of several models that have been shown to be useful. Perhaps some day we might get to know a few fault systems well enough to approach that level of prediction ability. Until then, the best thing is good engineering (earthquakes don't kill people, buildings do - some old EQ writer once said that), training, preparation in general, and early warning systems - 30 sec. or more of warning lets a lot of short-term reactions happen that can reduce damage and casualties.
Initial estimates ran as high as 750K; the official Chinese number was around 250K.
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
I'm pretty sure San Fransisco was founded - and boomed, due to the Gold Rush - well before people knew plate tectonics existed.
#DeleteChrome
We keep building cities on major fault-lines BECAUSE faults are good for a lot of human activities - they expose underground water and easy to mine resources. Cities simply tend to grow nearby. The same with volcanoes - their ash makes a very good soil. And we tend to rebuild those cities for one more reason - the surviving infrastructure and businesses.
Also, where else can we build and live? Each area has its own nature issues. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
People have been debating about it for decades. It is certain the cat Schrodinger in the box is definitely dead, whether or not the timer mechanism has triggered the poison gas to be released or not. No cat has survived this many decades without food or water. But still people argue about it, claiming non zero probability for the cat to be still alive. When science can't even answer whether or not a cat in the box for the last 80 years has died or not, how can it answer when the earthquake is going to strike?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
C'mon. There is no safe place on Earth. Oooo, don't build in the forest because it might burn. Oooo, don't build near the water because it might flood. Oooo, don't build in middle America because tornadoes.
Going to reference a fun, entertaining read, Ubiquity by Buchanan. It suggests the futility of attempting to predict, among many other things, earthquakes.
It likens earthquakes to numerous other seemingly unrelated scenarios, such as forest fires, stock crashes, and adding to a pile of sand one grain at a time. That is, their common element is that these systems keep building up toward a "critical state" that would erratically and unpredictably by our computational (for lack of a better term) limitations re-establish its equilibrium.
But some regions are much more prone to natural disasters than others. Take Berlin for example. Things Berlin does not have include active volcanoes, serious earthquakes, hurricanes and typhoons, tornadoes, various types of floodings from the sea (including tsunamis) and floodings from rivers. Compare this to a coastal city near a fault line, it would easily be prone to multiple of these types of disasters. Now keep in mind that about half of all cities in the world are build at the coast.
The author seems to be making the assumption that we shouldn't build cities in places where earthquakes can occur. Should we also not build them in places that are at risk for hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes, volcanoes, wildfires, or any other sort of natural disaster? If so, we've just ruled out a large fraction of land on earth, including most coastlines and just about the entire Pacific rim.
There are risks everywhere. They're different in different places, but nowhere is completely safe. You have to weigh the risks and benefits for any location.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Wow! Whoever said that has very limited social ability.
Arthur C. Clarke answered this in his 1996 book Richter 10.
Any research in this area will be blown up by muslim extremists because earthquakes are the will of allah.
In response to massive avalanches caused by snowpacks becoming gigantic and eventually collapsing from their own weight, resorts and mountain towns started using explosives to deliberately cause avalanches when the snowpacks were still small. There were more avalanches, but they were smaller - not large enough to be destructive to human infrastructure.
We accidentally stumbled onto the exact same thing with earthquakes. When the oil companies started fracking, we discovered the extra lubrication could trigger small earthquakes. Unfortunately, because a huge political movement was opposed to fracking, the headlines weren't "Fracking relieves stress which would've eventually caused a bigger earthquake." They were "Fracking causes earthquakes" - implying that all the energy of the earthquake somehow came from fracking, which is pure nonsense.
And possibly the greatest tool mankind has yet discovered that could help mitigate earthquake damage was turned into a political hot potato nobody will want to touch for fear of liability. Geothermal energy - the only "clean" energy source which could potentially have replaced base load power plants - has already become a casualty of this gross ignorance of the principle of Conservation of Energy.
I am a geophysicist and webdo not know the immediate cause of an earthquake. Scientists have been researching many possibilites for a half century with little luck. There are still more ideas more funding that could aid.
Buildings and roads should be designed for the maximum likely accelerations. These accelarations can be deduced from geophysical studies. Laws must enforce building codes. There are many places in the US where high quake accelerations are known, e.g. New York, Boston, D.C., Oklahoma, and building codes are woefully inadequate.
This pointing to an inability to change is the important part. The public massively resists change. The public also fails to appreciate that when we change one thing it often involves changing many others things to accommodate that change. For example, we all know that San Francisco needs to be moved quite a distance. San Francisco is a mega disaster in the making. But you can bet that the financial industry that loaned money for homes, buildings, and utilities to be built will not want to share in the losses incurred if the city was moved inland 150 miles and all buildings currently in place were leveled and returned to an uninhabited are filled with natural plants and animals. The city of Miami Beach is in the same predicament due to rising seas. To level the city and remove anything that would contaminate the sea when the sea swallows the city is next to impossible and without radical changes in government, laws and the assignment of responsibilities will mean that the coming disaster will be far worse.
When you're speaking of 1000 years in the future stuff, there's pretty much zero downside to the actual researchers for being wrong, or for that matter found to be so completely clueless that they make a round of cheese look clever by comparison.
True. But after it was nearly destroyed by a massive earthquake, the residents not only rebuilt the city, but continued (and continue to this day) to expand the city. they could have said "oh, this is a really bad place for a city" and gone elsewhere. Far more recently, China built a massive dam in an area prone to earthquakes. Worse, the dam is upstream of LOTS of people. But it's okay because the dam is earthquake proof. I believe it's called the Titanic Dam.
linquendum tondere
Yes. And there are extremely good reasons why we've done so. Fault lines are where minerals have come up from deep in the earth, so they're a rich source of precious resources. Therefore people go there to mine, and all the people follow that are needed to support that population. Eventually it snowballs and a city has developed. This is a similar reason there are also lots of cities near volcanos - look at Naples that is just as close to Vesuvius as Pompeii was but now has a population of a million. It's not that anyone is intentionally trying to build in a dangerous area, but creating jobs mean it happens that way anyway. You could build a city in the middle of a plate far from any faults or volcanos and be completely safe, but you'll also be without any resources. You'll scrape by (especially with the new service culture) but you'll never be as rich as a city on a fault line that's flush with gold, diamonds, etc.
The 1992 Roermond earthquake was a magnitude 5.3. At least in Earthquake zones, building codes can be more strict so damage is minimal.
Berlin is far north and has major storms. Snow and ice kill people every year, and things like respiratory infections, hypothermia, etc., kill many more.
There have been numerous floods, and cyclones as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
True. People live anywhere where the earth provides food and other goods. When the big tsunami occurred, some people in the Netherlands asked "why would anyone build their house in such an area?", upon which another dutchman asked "Why would anyone build a house 3 meters below sea level?". People live where they can.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Some fairly recent constructions in Japan have turned out to be on previously unknown fault lines. Some nuclear plants will probably never re-start because since the 2011 disaster they have been re-surveyed with better equipment than was available in the 80s and found to have faults under them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
With great minerals, come great earthquakes.
There is a risk market for earthquakes. Actuaries would love to have better predictability for earthquakes to better calculate the risk so that insurance products can be priced more accurately. If someone is going to fund earthquake research, real property insurers are your best bet.
There's significant correlation that stellar activity can influence large scale earthquakes here on earth though....
instrumenation?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
So take a piece of paper. Draw a bisecting line through the long direction where you think it will tear if you pull two corners apart. Now grab two corns on the long edge and start pulling the paper co until it tears. Did you predict where the tear is going to be? Statistically you will not successfully do so.
The dynamics of tearing the paper is similar to the dynamics of what causes earthquakes - basically it's cascading failure that has an exponential growth rate once it starts. These are notoriously hard to predict analytically.
We are bad at predicting earthquakes because they are underground. Duh! It's more than a little difficult to instrument underground. And note that the fundamental processes driving the system aren't at typical basement or foundation depth. We are talking tens to hundreds of kilometers underground.
Lots of people seem to be confused about what an earthquake is. When tectonic plates move against each other, the plate interfaces are just randomly organized surfaces. They aren't designed for movement! In fact the locking of plates is a key part of the setup for a quake. And the edges of the plates are just grinding away at each other in the most brutal and un-engineered way possible.
Well, we have very poor ways of visualizing these locked surfaces in any detail. The main ways we even know they are there are:
1). We can measure fault slip at the surface. When a particular location isn't moving and yet both upstream and downstream the same fault is moving, we know that a particular location is locked and primed for a quake;
2). If the geophysical locking structure comes all the way to the surface, then we can see it and spend extra time studying it.
I don't know, quakewatch.net seems to be doing pretty good with their alerting...
Nate Silvers book, _The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't_, contains a more detailed explanation.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.