Everybody's now used to seeing weather maps with
"past" and "future" buttons on them, allowing you to see
what the weather is likely to be a day or two ahead of time. Did you know there is at least one company
that is now publishing a similar map of the world that depicts regions that may
shortly experience earthquakes?
QuakeFinder, which calls itself a "humanitarian R&D
project" of a parent firm named Stellar Solutions, has a Public Data Center
page where they put little red dots in regions that have experienced a change
in electromagnetic activity, which (according to QuakeFinder) has been
correlated with future earthquakes.
I don't know how much traffic their site attracts, and so far I haven't
seen any red dots show up, but I just found out about the site today.
QuakeFinder bases their predictions on three types of
data: (1) ultra-low-frequency
(ULF) magnetic fields, (2) concentration of ions in the air, and (3) emission
of infrared radiation as monitored by satellites. A number of studies over the last few decades have turned up
situations in which disturbances in all three quantities have preceded medium
to large earthquakes in many locations.
Of course, it's a long stretch between noticing some correlations and
using data to make specific predictions about earthquakes. But at least two
organizations—QuakeFinder and another outfit called GeoCosmo—seem to think that
there's enough data to start estimating the timing, location, and size of
future earthquakes.
I will leave the question of whether QuakeFinder's
predictions are accurate aside for the moment, and turn to what might be an
even more vexing issue: once you
have a way of predicting earthquakes with some degree of precision, what should
you do with it?
A lot depends on the level of false positives (times you say
there will be a quake and nothing, or almost nothing, happens) and false
negatives (times you miss making a prediction and an earthquake catches you by
surprise). Let's say for the sake
of argument that the system does as well at predicting earthquakes as today's
weather forecasters do at predicting tornado activity. I don't have exact statistics on hand
at the moment, but my sense is that the great majority of the time when a
region is in a tornado watch, some violent weather usually occurs—either a
tornado or high winds that can cause as much damage as a small tornado. And the weather prophets very rarely
get caught napping nowadays by failing to predict violent weather, although
there are times when a storm becomes a lot worse than forecasts predicted.
At one extreme, it would be the height of moral
irresponsibility to know that a major earthquake is going to hit a populated
area (where "know" means, say, an 80% chance), and not do anything to
let the affected people take precautions.
So the development of a truly reliable earthquake prediction system
carries with it the moral obligation to share the information in some form with
the general public.
On the other hand, what sorts of precautions should be taken
if earthquake prediction becomes a reality? I can imagine different degrees of preparedness for
different groups. First responders
and emergency services would take such predictions most seriously by increasing
reserve staffing and supplies and heightening their readiness for a
crisis. People in structures that
are known to be especially vulnerable to earthquake damage might consider just
staying away for a few days.
Depending on how far in advance a quake could be predicted, this could
be a problem.
It's not clear yet whether earthquake prediction will share
with tornado prediction the characteristic that shorter time spans mean more
accurate predictions. If a weather
radar shows a tornado two miles west of you heading east at thirty miles an
hour, it's pretty easy to say you'll be in big trouble in about four
minutes. It's possible that the
best earthquake predictions may never provide time windows narrower than many
hours or even days. Making people
stay home or in earthquake-resistant shelters for several days is simply not
going to fly, so a lot will depend on how chronologically precise the
predictions can be made.
Another important question is, who's going to pay? When scientific prediction of weather
first became possible in the late 1800s, the economic and military advantages
of doing so were so obvious that most national governments established weather
bureaus or the equivalent, and for many years government weather prediction was
the only show in town. The
observation end of weather forecasting—all those weather stations, weather
satellites, and people keeping records for decades—is still expensive, and
borne largely by government agencies, but a large number of private
weather-forecasting firms now take government data and use it for both public
predictions through the media and specialized predictions through commercial
transactions.
So far, the model used by QuakeFinder is a non-profit one,
although the line dividing a non-profit organization from a commercial
operation is not always that easy to draw. QuakeFinder does apparently have "subscribers" who
presumably get customized data.
Weather bureaus and weather forecasting prospered because their forecasts
were accurate enough to be valuable, and we can expect earthquake forecasting
to be held to a similar standard.
On its website, QuakeFinder claims to have predicted a couple of
Peruvian earthquakes, which claim is confirmed indirectly by contemporary news
reports citing the involvement of a "California company" (presumably
QuakeFinder) in a prediction by a Peruvian scientist of two medium-size
earthquakes in Peru in April of 2013.
But just as two swallows don't make a summer, two
predictions don't make a successful prediction system. Large segments of the scientific
community remain unconvinced that earthquake prediction is anything more than a
slightly informed guess. According
to some sources (including journalist Alberto Enriquez), one of the biggest wet
blankets on earthquake prediction is the United States Geological Survey
(USGS). Apparently back in the
1980s, this agency received extra funding to develop earthquake predictions,
and they got burned when their forecast of a major earthquake (again in Peru)
failed to materialize in 1981.
Ever since, according to Enriquez, they have been critical of earthquake
prediction and have made it hard for researchers to publish in this area or to
receive funding.
But other agencies such as the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA) are supporting the work of researchers such as
Friedemann Freund, who has been mentioned previously in this space as the
developer of a theory (confirmed by experiments) that stressed rocks can
produce large electric and magnetic fields when mobile charge carriers he calls
"p-holes" arise in them.
Freund is one of the founders of GeoCosmo, which focuses on earthquake
prediction studies.
The nice thing about private enterprise is that it's
self-limiting. If QuakeFinder or
GeoCosmo get it right often enough, people will start paying attention. Let's hope they can figure out how to
do it and get taken seriously enough to save some lives before the next big
quake hits.
Sources: I thank Alberto Enriquez for
drawing my attention to recent developments in this field through his website http://seismoem.com/blog/earthquake-forecasting-is-here-today. QuakeFinder's website is at https://www.quakefinder.com/. GeoCosmo's website is geocosmo.org. A news report on June 25, 2013
providing independent confirmation of the Peruvian earthquake prediction
attempt is at http://www.peruthisweek.com/news-peruvian-geologists-may-be-able-to-predict-earthquakes-100220. I also referred to an article by Julia
Rosen carried on the American Association for Advancement of Science Science website, entitled "Can
electric signals in Earth's atmosphere predict earthquakes?" at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/12/can-electric-signals-earth-s-atmosphere-predict-earthquakes. Friedemann Freund's research in
"seismoelectromagnetics" (the electric and magnetic fields produced
by stressed rocks) was summarized in this space in "Global Warming or
Global Shaking? A Tale of Two
Theories" on Feb. 20, 2007.
No comments:
Post a Comment