Failure™ Magazine

Fault-y Predictions

Scientists still a long way from being able to predict when earthquakes will strike.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Science & Technology

And, if you include the Pacific Northwest, we know the Big One is going to be a magnitude 9-ish earthquake on the [Cascadia] subduction zone. There was a quake like that in 1700.

Do you believe we’ll ever be able to predict earthquakes?
I’m inclined to doubt it, but I think it’s possible. The question is: Are we ever going to be able to identify something in the earth that tells us—unmistakably—that a “big one” is coming. It’s worth keeping the lines of investigation going, but there’s been an awful lot of work and we haven’t found anything yet.

What about the notion that Eric Calais, a professor of geophysics at Purdue University, predicted the Port-au-Prince earthquake. Is that an accurate characterization?
A number of scientists, including Calais, have worked on the faults in Haiti and reached the conclusion that Port-au-Prince was a disaster waiting to happen. It’s the same story that one finds in many places around the world: a large urban population center plus one or more active faults plus structures and infrastructure that are woefully unprepared for strong earthquakes. We can’t make specific predictions of when big quakes might strike, but we can identify segments of faults that, in geological terms, are “ripe” for big events. Other examples include: the Hayward fault in northern California; the Himalaya Arc faults along the Kashmir Valley; the Northern Anatolian fault near Istanbul; and the distributed active faults close to Tehran. Any one city might be 50 or even 100 years away from its doomsday event, but some cities are clearly in the cross hairs.

What else should we know about the Haiti event?
One key point concerns earthquake clustering: the recent quake struck on a segment of the Enriquilla-Plantain Garden fault, a break that appears to have ended just to the west of Port-au-Prince. The adjacent segment of the fault to the east could produce an earthquake as large or even larger; such an earthquake would rock Port-au-Prince all over again. It could be 50 years from now, it could be tomorrow. As the recovery and rebuilding efforts get underway, it’s critical for people to understand that the earthquake hazard has not gone away. If anything, it has increased.

Did You Feel It? (by the U.S. Geological Survey)

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