Item — HN Reader

I hope in my lifetime we discover a way to predict earthquakes better, the danger to life from them would be significantly less if there was sufficient notification.

We can alert for storms, tornadoes, volcanoes, hurricanes, typhoons, and even somewhat extraterrestrial disasters like asteroids.

The earth itself must move in predictable patterns similar to the weather, and I'm sure there is decades of research around this I'll never even approach to understanding. Just surprising to have such a big knowledge gap that affects humanity year round

3 comments

We are actually pretty good at predicting the long term for specific regions. This allows building codes to be based on the seismic activity of the region. Sadly this isn't something that's practical in many parts of the world

Even if it's predictable the opaqueness of the earth crust makes predictive models hard

Really I suspect that's the only hard part. If we had accurate 3d models of the structure (well 4d, 3d models over time) it would probably be reasonably easy to estimate how much strain it can take, and how much strain there is... Maybe not predict-to-the-second levels of detail but at least to predict that a quake we see is likely to be a precursor to a much larger one or is likely that peak.

But getting that data seems... practically impossible at our current tech level.

> at least to predict that a quake we see is likely to be a precursor to a much larger one or is likely that peak.

That we can basically do. "Observations show that the chance of an earthquake being followed by a larger one nearby and within a week is about 5%."

https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-probability-earthquake-a-fore...

It is an incredibly safe bet that any earthquake is not the sign of a larger one.

5% within a week is a very high set of odds for such rare events. Or to look at it from the other more relevant direction 70% of magnitude 7 or larger quakes have detected foreshocks...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreshock

I fear that we can only predict them if we deliberately trigger them to release the energy.