Experts can’t predict Big One? How ’bout pets?

Gaining traction?
Compared with lost-pet listings and telltale eartones, the seismo-magnetic connection seems to be gaining more traction in at least some scientific quarters. If it turns out that there's nothing to the idea, "there's probably a thousand people around the world who are wasting their time," said Tom Bleier of Palo Alto, Calif.-based QuakeFinder, a private seismic research firm.

Bleier would be one of those people. For more than a decade, Bleier has been doing his own research into the seismo-magnetic connection — starting out by placing kit-built magnetometers in schools and other locations around the San Andreas Fault.

Three years ago, QuakeFinder also participated in a satellite mission called QuakeSat — which Bleier said detected some "very unusual" bursts of electromagnetic noise linked to 2003's San Simeon magnitude-6.5 earthquake and half a dozen other seismic episodes.

"Now, is that enough?" he asked. "No, not really. That's not statistically significant at six or seven earthquakes."

The next step, he said, is to run through a much bigger data set from France's Demeter satellite, which was designed to look for correlations between seismic activity and electromagnetic disturbances in the ionosphere.

Czech researchers have already used the Demeter data to analyze 3,500 earthquakes greater than magnitude 4.8, and Bleier said they've seen "a trend of increased signatures several hours before the earthquake, if they happened to fly over the area."

Such signals could be linked to other claimed precursors of seismic shocks, including thermal hot spots as well as "earthquake lights," a type of ball-lightning effect associated with quakes, Bleier said.

"There are two or three dozen scientists around the world that are trying to make sense out of the signals," he said.

And that's the rub: making sense out of phenomena that may be linked or merely coincidental.

Nailing down the connection
The magnetic signals could well have been sparked by solar activity, or even human-made sources. In a recent letter to IEEE Spectrum, University of Tokyo quake researcher Robert Geller and other skeptics said efforts in the field of earthquake prediction had "no quantitatively testable theory to back them up."

"Work in this field has now been going on for over 25 years, and the absence of strong supporting statistical evidence does not bode well," they wrote. In fact, Geller and others have long argued that earthquakes are inherently unpredictable.

Another aspect of the debate has to do with false alarms: Non-predictions for earthquakes that don't happen are nearly as important as the prediction that turns out to be right. China, for example, had to clamp down on its experimental quake alerts in 1999 after a costly rash of false alarms.

How big was the 1906 earthquake? Levels of magnitude quoted for the 1906 San Francisco earthquake vary from the low sevens to the high eights. Which is correct? That's difficult to pin down, in part because data for the 1906 earthquake are often poor because of the relatively unsophisticated technology of the period and also because most of the few stations in existence back then were not in optimum locations. Two recent studies — one consolidating measurements taken at almost 100 observatories around the world and the other examining ground deformation caused by the quake — have put the disaster at magnitude 7.7 to 7.9. SOURCE: U.S. Geological Survey

A quick look at Berkland's Web site certainly turns up plenty of false alarms among the claimed successes.

For example, last month both Orey and Berkland passed along predictions for magnitude-7 quakes that didn't come to pass.

Even mainstream research focusing on the first faint tremors of an actual earthquake, known as the P-wave, suffers from the false-alarm factor. Some scientists believe quake-savvy animals are actually reacting to the P-wave's propagation. However, the USGS's Schwartz said, "There are some scientific issues about whether or not there really is information in the P-wave that says whether it's going to turn into a bigger earthquake."

Where to put the research bucks?
With so many theories to track down, Schwartz said his agency has to pick its shots carefully — considering that the USGS's annual budget for earthquake programs is a relatively modest $50 million, or less than a tenth the cost of a single space shuttle mission.

"When there's such limited money for research on earthquakes, you have to make decisions on where you want to put your buck," he said. "And clearly the community as a whole doesn't want to put its money on short-term prediction."

But Schwartz still holds out hope of shrinking the time horizon for seismic forecasting from its present decades-long scale, as more sensitive monitoring networks like the Plate Boundary Observatory and the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth are put into place. Another technology, known as interferometric synthetic aperture radar, or InSAR, is getting a lot of attention for its ability to detect millimeter-scale ground movements from space.

"Down the road, you might turn on your TV and get your strain report in addition to your weather report," he speculated.

That sounds eerily similar to one of Orey's dreams: "We want earthquakes to be forecast on the Weather Channel," she said.

There's at least one other point on which the earthquake sensitive and the earthquake scientist agree: People shouldn't just sit and wait for the Big One, or even a five-day extended forecast. The time to get ready is now.

"We're not out there to freak out the public and cause panic, which could be worse," Orey said. "But we're saying, get prepared. And so many people aren't."

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