For decades this has been the holy grail in seismology:
THE USGS IN PASADENA HAS ISSUED A
* SEVERE EARTHQUAKE WARNING FOR...
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA INCLUDING LOS ANGELES, ORANGE, VENTURA, SAN BERNARDINO, RIVERSIDE, AND SAN DIEGO COUNTIES
THERE ARE STRONG INDICATIONS FROM GEOPHYSICAL READINGS THAT A LARGE EARTHQUAKE EXCEEDING MAGNITUDE 7 WILL OCCUR ALONG THE SAN ANDREAS FAULT WITHIN THE NEXT 24 TO 72 HOURS.
ALL PREPAREDNESS ACTIVITIES SHOULD BE RUSHED TO COMPLETION.
* SOME LOCATIONS THAT WILL EXPERIENCE STRONG TO DAMAGING SHAKING INCLUDE...
LOS ANGELES... SAN BERNARDINO... ANAHEIM...
PALM SPRINGS... GREAT BEAR... RIVERSIDE...
VENTURA...
The above is not real. It isn't possible. Despite decades of research (and about the same for irritants from practitioners of pseudoscience) no one has come any closer to predicting earthquakes with any reliability or precision. The 1970s were the heyday of earthquake prediction. The science has not really advanced since then, and proposed methods do not appear to work. The best we can get are Early Warning (which need the earthquake to be in progress---but are very effective) and statistical forecasts, which have uncertainty and flaws.
NASA is going to try anyway.
There have been lots of scientific inquiries about the subject. The Japanese have a billions-dollar prediction program because their country is shaken so often. In fact earthquakes are covered by their weather service. The prediction program has not really borne fruit, although it likely will continue because of immense bureaucratic inertia, the kind one gets with over a half century of almost unbroken single-party rule. It's also expanded into preparedness and hazard mitigation, perhaps the most comprehensive on the planet.
Animal precursors look promising but most studies find this apparent precursor is due to the earthquake already in progress (animals likely react to fast moving P-waves which come first, and people generally cannot perceive P-waves ) or something called "flashbulb memory" or how unremarkable events can be recalled with clarity if they are associated or near a strong emotional event. All of us remember what they were doing on 9/11, for example. I can even remember exactly what kind of underwear (teal boxer briefs, Hanes brand, they were fairly old and had some holes in them) I was wearing. That's flashbulb memory.
More scientific methods using changes in Vs/Vp were championed by the Soviets but these too failed.
A spectacular failure was the Brady/Spence prediction, which you can read about here. In short, Brady predicted a massive quake would strike Peru in 1981, which sent Peru into a panic to the extent that they ordered 100,000 body bags. His prediction was wrong, no earthquake occurred, and his apparent methods were so confusing that no one could understand them. It's no wonder the US has more or less dropped funding of such research, leaving it to either other nations (like Greece and Japan, and neither have had success) or the cranks and pseudo-scientists who are always wrong or lying or both.
(USGS did continue funding the Parkfield Experiment. Parkfield, CA sits astride a portion of the San Andreas Fault that for the last century or so has experienced an M6 earthquake at intervals of about 22 years. The most recent quake was forecast to arrive in 1993. It arrived in 2004, years late, and without any precursors despite all the equipment strewn along the fault and the suggestion that previous Parkfield quakes came with measurable precursors.)
So it's a bit of a surprise that NASA seems to want to take the plunge in a couple different efforts that really don't have seismologists impressed.
The first one is open to the crowd and is described here:
There is a long history of research into the causes of distinct ultra-low frequency (~0.01 – 1.0 Hz)[P(1] electromagnetic pulses (EMP) emanating from the earth near earthquake epicenters in the weeks leading up to some moderate and large events, but the connection between EMP and earthquakes is still debated. One theory suggests that fracturing rock in the earth’s crust creates an electrical charge migration, or ‘pulses’, that travels to the land surface and manifest as a small change in the local magnetic field that is detectable with sensitive magnetometer sensors. However, there are a number of natural and man-made EMP ‘noise’ sources, such as lightning, solar storms, electric rail[P(2] , and nearby traffic that can mask or mimic electromagnetic pulses that may or may not be associated with earthquakes.
The ‘Quest for Quakes’ competitors will attempt to develop new software codes or algorithms to uniquely identify the electromagnetic pulses that may precede an earthquake by days to weeks.
I bolded a portion there because EMP and earthquakes, and their linkage, is pretty dubious. When NASA describes that this is "still debated" that doesn't quite cover the half of it. (
this paper, despite being from 1997, doesn't read too much differently from arguments raised now.)
But if you can code, you can register and perhaps win some money for it.
Your task is to develop a software algorithm to uniquely identify the electromagnetic pulses that may precede an earthquake by days to weeks.
Each data set contains measurements from 5 to 9 different sites. Each site provides 3 channels of information, measured at a frequency of 32 or 50 samples per second. Hourly data for all the sites and channels will be given to your algorithm. Your algorithm should return the probability of an earthquake event happening for every coming hour at each site, for a period of 90 days.
The earthquake signal propagation speed is of the order of 4km/second, but here is a more precise formula for the earthquake transit time. The distance in km between two locations can be calculated with the formula given here.
As a real raw magnetometer data, it may measure many signals with the origins non-related to earthquakes. Many of those signals may have even stronger amplitude than the signal from the events themselves. Here are just a few examples of some of the known signals of that type: Vehicle engines, lightning, solar flares, electrical interference, magnetometer resets, ...
Hey, even though I think this will not bear any fruit, will not predict anything, and will only discover things in hindsight, it's worth a shot. So go for it.
This isn't NASA's only effort. There's also this.
Earthquake science is poised to capitalize on a revolutionary capability for observing global crustal deformation. The concurrent improvements in seismic monitoring networks, high-performance computing, and geodetic measurement of crustal deformation have yielded significant advances in knowledge of fault behavior and crustal stress during the past decades.
A major leap forward will be enabled with the ability to monitor crustal deformation with high temporal and spatial resolution. That capability will extend the observational spectrum into the realm of transient and aseismic deformation. These fast but seismically quiet deformation processes, which are at present poorly understood components of the strain budget, are key to developing a complete understanding of earthquake physics. Community models of earthquake physics and seismic hazards, developed in a data-rich environment will rapidly evolve in response to the data. These new models are expected to yield future earthquake forecasts of useful dimensions that will feed decision support tools to mitigate losses from future large earthquakes.
Some things: yes, it's now possible to monitor crustal deformation--or the change in land level and shape---from space.
Sentinel 1 and
Sentinel 2 are satellites designed to do just that. Both are returning great science. There's also
InSAR, which you probably became familiar with after the Nepal quake this year. InSAR (you can read more about it in this PDF
here) determined how much the region was raised or sunk after the quake, including Mt. Everest (2 millimeters, if you're curious.)
A network of satellites like the Sentinels could perhaps see precursory deformation. The problem of course is precursory deformation can take place over a period of decades to centuries (as is happening now on the coast in the Pacific Northwest.) Sometimes, we don't even know whether that deformation is a sign of a quake that's due next week or three centuries from now. The Japanese registered lots of indications of crustal deformation before Tohoku, for example.
I'm not sure this would have success in prediction.
But this one seems to be nonsense.
The GEFS platform was installed on the roof of Ketchikan High School and started collecting data Jan. 16. The sensors in the platform track levels of pre-earthquake signals, including carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, as well as electrical currents, according to Ron Fortunato of Trillium Learning, an education outreach organization that connects professional and student researchers.
Students at Ketchikan High School in Ketchikan, Alaska, began earthquake monitoring research, using this air ion counter and weather monitor, in a partnership with NASA earlier in January.
When two tectonic plates or faults move or collide, it creates both an electrical current and an earthquake, according to Fortunato. But the electrical current – along with the gases it creates when it passes through biological material - can be measured by sensors minutes or even hours before the earthquake itself happens.
These pre-earthquake signals eventually could buy valuable time in which nuclear reactors can be secured or people evacuated, Fortunato said. GEFS platforms in Kodiak picked up an electric current on Jan. 17, but the earthquake didn't happen for nearly 31 hours – it finally hit near Talkeetna early Monday morning.
oh dear.
There is a lot that isn't right here. For example, the quake referenced was M4.1. It was also hundreds of kilometers away from Kodiak. This would not, in any way, be a success, especially for Alaska, where quakes of M3 and M4 happen many times a day. It seems exceedingly unlikely that a tiny electrical current apparently generated by a relatively tiny earthquake could propagate to be detected, in our noisy electrical environment, hundreds of miles away. This really looks like an error of the post hoc ergo propter hoc variety---which earthquake prediction is full of.
NASA seems to be contracting with these people whose effort to bring STEM to schools seems a bit undercut by pseudoscience and that is a problem in of itself. And as previously linked, seismologists are not impressed. This research group within NASA doesn't seem to understand the physics of earthquake processes--or they understand them even less than geophysicists. Even so, I think it's cool they're getting students involved in STEM (which should be STEAM--but that's a different diary), even though the "science" these students are working with is out there and likely bunk.
A great book is this one. I'm aware one can read much of it via google preview, but go find it in your library or buy it yourself at Amazon or your preferred bookseller. Dr. Hough's book and her bibliography is where much of this diary originates, and I've reviewed it here in the past.
I personally believe earthquake prediction is hopeless, and the best we'll get are the current forecasts (themselves imperfect and rife with uncertainty) and earthquake early warning like that in Japan and Mexico. I think funding is better spent retrofitting buildings and building resilient communities. But note that I also don't think funders should pull their money from these projects. That's the difference between being skeptical and completely close-minded.