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Is It Possible To Predict Earthquakes?
With damage and devastation seen across the globe, earthquakes are one of the most lethal natural disasters, and yet we cannot seem to be able to do anything to warn people of an upcoming quake…yet.
In the year to August 2016 not a month has gone by without fatalities from an earthquake and in 2015 the total number of people killed was nearly 10,000 with an even higher number injured and displaced. So what can we do to prevent this from happening in the future?
To sum it up – nothing. Scientists have for decades been trying to find precursor events that can predict an upcoming earthquake with little or no success. When you think that many large cities lie on fault lines with potentially millions of people at risk you can understand why this is a race against time. I’m not saying that the movie ‘San Andreas’ is going to happen as depicted, indeed much of the effects of the quake in the film were widely exaggerated to make it more exciting for movie-goers, but the chain of earthquakes that triggered the event does happen and has been seen in the past.
Yet there is an exciting new project that does seem to be raising expectations in the geological community. A group of scientists from the University College, London have developed a system using satellites that could possibly sense when and where an earthquake is about to strike. If this works, the warnings could save countless lives and help governments to set up evacuation areas hours or even days before an earthquake hits.
The plan is to launch two satellites that can detect changes in the electromagnetic spectrum that occur before a major earthquake starts. It is thought that these electromagnetic fluctuations are caused by pockets of radon gas that escape through the small fissures that are created by the earth’s movements prior to an earthquake. The TWINSAT program will be used to measure these radon emissions and provide warnings to people in the affected areas. Or it would if it could receive the funding, and this is the crazy part, they have to beg for the money to get their project off the ground.
The problem, says Richard Luckett of the British Geological Survey is that ‘…there has been, you can say, quite a bit of quackery in the name of science. There are people who claim they use their dogs to predict earthquakes. And many such hypotheses have received more credence than they should have.’
This means that many grant sources are sceptical about anything to do with earthquake predicting and are steering clear of new projects such as TWINSAT. Without the funding in place we can only hope that the next big earthquake doesn’t happen under our own feet.
The author of this article, Ian Yates, lives in Crete - Greece, which is an active earthquake zone. There are regular tremors felt on the island with the largest of his own personal experience being a 6.2 magnitude earthquake in June of 2013.
