However, existing equipment would need to be about 50 times more sensitive to detect an earthquake predictor.

It is impossible to predict earthquakes.

When it comes to timing when an earthquake will strike, the puzzle is missing an important piece that seismologists call a harbinger: the telltale sign of an earthquake that precedes a major event. To date, no one has found a reliable premise; many scientists don’t believe they can find it.

But two researchers may have made a breakthrough in their search for a messenger. If true, earthquakes could reveal their presence with GPS measurements hours before the major events involved.” Conceptually this shows that it is possible. “This is a huge step forward,” said Quentin Blathery, a seismologist at the Institute for Development Studies and the University of the Cote d’Azur in France.

Bletery and colleague Jean-Mathieu Noquet, Data setThe University of Nevada is located in Reno. Every five minutes, thousands of stations around the world log their GPS positions. These observations allow scientists to detect even minute movements. If the earth was moving, Blatheri and Nocke could see it in the GPS data.

Blatheri and Nocke selected GPS stations located around the known locations of 7.0 or greater earthquakes, and examined the recorded positions of these stations and how they changed in the 48 hours before the relevant earthquake. They calculated how well the actual motion matched the motion they expected each earthquake to cause.

The researchers found that in the last two hours before an earthquake, ground motions often begin to match the expected motion. This alignment seemed to increase as the time of the earthquake approached. Although this pattern is small, it is not usually evident when Blatheri and Nocke examine randomly selected two-hour windows that are mostly earthquake-free.

Therefore, the movement in these last two hours may contain the harbingers that seismologists have long sought. But even with this information, seismologists are far from turning it into a tool for predicting earthquakes. This is because modern vehicles are not good enough to catch this movement before it happens. To detect the sign of a single earthquake, existing equipment would need to be about 50 times more sensitive, Blatheri says.

“This is a huge technology gap,” Blatheri says. “We don’t have the technology to do that yet.” Adding more GPS stations might work, and Blatheri expects scientists to do just that, but that alone won’t be enough.

Still, Bletheri thinks it’s a sign of progress that might interest scientists. First, he said, his discoveries provide evidence that earthquakes are not chaotic, momentary events that result from sudden fault movements. The faster two-hour preview shows that earthquakes may have precursors that could give them away before they occur.

In addition, its results raised other questions. The largest earthquake Bleteri and Noke studied was the 9.0-magnitude Tohoku-Oki earthquake in 2011, which triggered a devastating tsunami off the east coast of Japan. When they examined GPS data along the coast of Japan, they found that the movements coincided much earlier than two hours before the earthquake: in a cycle that seemed to repeat itself every 3.6 hours. What causes this cycle, if any, remains a mystery. Source