A council of scientists charged with evaluating earthquake
prediction has found promise in a method that has had some limited
success in the past.
The California Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council has
recognized that the method developed by a team of researchers from
UCLA, Russia, France and Japan “appears to be a legitimate
approach in earthquake prediction research.”
The team ““ led by Professor Vladimir Keilis-Borok of the
Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UCLA ““ has
predicted that an earthquake of a magnitude 6.4 or greater will
occur in Southern California on or before Sept. 5.
The area that could be affected includes parts of the Mojave
Desert, Coachella Valley, Imperial Valley and eastern San Diego
County.
The UCLA team’s method relies on identifying patterns of
small and medium-magnitude earthquakes to forecast the occurrence
of a larger earthquake of a magnitude greater than or equal to
6.4.
The Northridge earthquake, which struck in 1994, measured at a
magnitude of 6.7 and resulted in damages worth $40 billion.
The earthquake prediction method has seen some successes, as the
team was able to roughly predict when and where large earthquakes
would strike Japan and central California last year.
The team was able to roughly predict the Sept. 25 earthquake in
Hokkaido, Japan and the Dec. 22 earthquake in San Simeon.
But the council has decided not to act in response because the
area in question is so large and because the council could not
validate the prediction based solely on two previous successes,
said Michael Reichle, acting state geologist with the California
Geological Survey.
But being prepared to endure earthquakes should be the focus of
all Californians regardless of whether they know one is coming,
Reichle said.
The area in question is a hotbed of seismic activity, and the
report stated that the probability of a large earthquake in a
random nine-month period is about 10 percent.
A variety of active faults converge in the region and include a
part of the San Andreas fault, the San Jacinto fault, the Imperial
fault and the Elsinore fault.
Previous efforts to track the tumultuous nature of earthquakes
in California have not been as promising as the method devised by
the UCLA team.
People have been looking for a way to predict earthquakes for
decades, said John Vidale, interim director of the UCLA institute,
in an interview with the Daily Bruin in January.
“Ordinarily, I wouldn’t believe it for a minute, but
since (Keilis-Borok’s) first two guesses are right, we have
to take this seriously,” Vidale said.
Researchers found that activity in Parkfield, a small central
Californian town that lies on the San Andreas fault, occurred at
roughly regular intervals and thought that an earthquake would come
around 1993. It never came.
“(Researchers) thought (Parkfield earthquake activity) was
pretty regular, but the problem turned out to be more
complicated,” Reichle said.