DisastersScientists question earthquake prediction methods

From 2008 to 2011, three earthquakes have significantly damaged different parts of the world. Those quakes were significantly underestimated by scientists and seismologists.

Now a few high-profile earthquake researchers are questioning long standing methods of predicting earthquakes and are looking for new and more accurate ways to forecast where, when, and how disastrous an earthquake will be when it strikes.

Voice of America reports that earthquakes in China (2008), Haiti (2010), and Japan (2011) were highly underestimated by scientists. They did not foresee the intense tremors and extensive damage the earthquakes caused, and were left stunned by the damage.

The quake in Japan, a country famous  for its seismological and tsunami research and hazard mapping, caught scientists off guard – and they were doubly surprised by the size of the quake and tsunami that followed.

Seth Stein, an earth sciences professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, thought the 11 March quake showed the field that scientists did not know as much as they once thought.

“One, our ability to assess earthquake hazards isn’t very good,” Stein told Voice of America. “And, second, the policies that we make to mitigate earthquake hazards sometimes aren’t very well thought out in terms of whatever tens or a hundred billion dollars were spent on those tsunami defenses were largely wasted.”

Robert Geller, a Tokyo University seismologist, teamed up with Stein to write a new research article which would debunk the standard assumptions in the field of earthquakes.

“Many earth scientists still continue out of intellectual inertia to use terms like ‘seismic cycle’ or ‘characteristic earthquake’ or ‘earthquake cycle” or things like that. So we’ve become prisoners to some extent of terms we use,” Geller told Voice of America. “It’s time for the field of seismology and earthquake science to rethink some of the basic precepts.”

Geller thinks the people in his field should start looking at new ideas and expect new outcomes when it comes to earthquakes.

“Unfortunately we don’t, at the present time, have the scientific ability to make specific predictions in their immediate advance, or, let’s say, years in advance,” he told Voice of America. “All of those various kinds of predictions have in fact been made, but they usually don’t work out.”

One problem when it comes to predicting earthquakes is that the earthquakes hazards maps were made in a bit of a rush.

“Now we’ve got these maps out there. Every country has a government agency that makes these maps and engineers look at them,” Stein told Voice of America. “There’s some good sense in them, but there’s a lot of problems with them too and the uncertainties in there are a lot bigger than we use to think they were.”

Geller, meanwhile, thinks the maps are what has been holding experts back from finding other ideas.

“They’re based on one assumption piled on top of another. If you treat them as being something you can literally rely on as extremely accurate then you’re in trouble,” he said.

Now scientists are going back and looking into geological sampling as well as recorded eyewitness accounts to help produce more accurate records of when and where tsunamis and earthquakes hit.

“These mega tsunamis, you had three of them in 3,000 years, once every thousand years or so. So, if you have a nuclear plant with a 50-year operating lifetime you’re talking about a five percent chance of a mega tsunami [during the plant’s operation],” Geller explained. “So that’s enough [of a chance] that you should worry about it.”

Gellar now knows it is wrong to assume that certain locations such as the coast of Fukushima were at lower risk for such huge temblors, but is upset that almost nothing has changed since last year’s tsunami in terms making new policies.

“I’m not really happy about that. I wish I hadn’t been correct,” he said. “There’s not much pleasure in saying ‘I told you so’ when so many people lost their lives or their houses or the nuclear accident caused the evacuation and so on.”