Seismologist predicts earthquake in south Iran at the end of the month

The earthquake in Italy two weeks ago has claimed the lives of more than 200 people. It was made more poignant by claims of an Italian researcher who said he had predicted the quake and warned the authorities — which ignored the warning (see below). Last week we wrote that scientists said this claim is unfounded, as earthquakes cannot be predicted with accuracy (8 April 2009 HS Daily Wire).

The effort to predict earthquakes is not new. If tremors could be predicted, the authorities could take prepare and take action — perhaps not to limit damage to property, but to save live by evacuating people from the earthquake area. New Scientist wrote last year about the attempts of two Chinese researchers to predict earthquakes several weeks in advance using unusual cloud formations. One of the researchers, Guangmeng Guo of the Remote Sensing Center at Nanjing Normal University in Jiangsu province, eastern China, recently e-mailed the magazine’s Catherine Brahic with an update. He said his team has detected the same unusual clouds above Iran. They predict that there will be a magnitude 5.0 to 6.0 earthquake at the end of April in southern Iran.

According to Guo, the pressure that builds up in rocks before an earthquake causes electromagnetic disturbances which influence cloud formation overhead. The characteristic shapes can be seen in satellite pictures and act as an early warning signal of tectonic stresses. “This method can be used to predict location and magnitude, but it is difficult to predict the date,” writes Guo.

Note that Guo is not alone in believing it is possible to forecast earthquakes several weeks or months before they happen. Friedemann Freund, a visiting astrochemist at the NASA Goddard center, is working on a similar theory.

In the case of the earthquake in Italy, seismologist Gioacchino Giuliani said he had predicted the earthquake that struck l’Aquila on 6 April and killed more than 200 people. Giuliani’s forecasts were based not on cloud formations, but on concentrations of radon gas, which is also thought to be related to geological stresses. He was forced to remove his findings from the Internet because local authorities thought he was spreading panic (as we wrote on 8 April, many seismologists said the authorities were right to do so because there is no way to predict earthquakes with any accuracy. They argue that the fact that Giuliani’s predictions happened to materialize is statistically meaningless: Winning the lottery is not an argument for gambling).

Brahic notes that all these theories are still far from conclusively proven though, putting the days of formal earthquake forecasts some way off.