Nowadays there is a large amount of geological and seismic data collected. When earthquakes occur people try to do data analysis on this data to see if there are predictors. For example, there are people who look for foreshocks or changes in wave propagation, and so on. It seems to me that the next step beyond passive data collection would be to send active probe impulses to find the current condition of faults and whether they would fail soon. Is this done or not?

In any case, earthquake prediction may be a misnomer. One can never predict the precise time of an earthquake. But with more data and detection of ever smaller features, one can give more granular probabilistic predictions. So instead of saying there is a probability \(p\) of earthquake in the next 30 years, we may be able to either say (at any given moment) there is a probability \(p_1 \ll p\), or probability \(p_2 \gg p\) of one within the next year.

Comments(0)