A few days ago there was a earthquake of magnitude 7.8 in Turkey and Syria, which has killed thousands of people, and scientists are working around the clock to predict the next big earthquake and thus save thousands of lives.
A team of seismologists and statisticians from Northwestern University, they have created a new model that claims to predict when and where the next major earthquake will occur by taking into account the order and specific timing of previous earthquakes, rather than relying only on the average time between earthquakes ancient.
They discovered that faults have long-term memory, so an earthquake has not released all the stress that has built up on the fault over time, some of that stress still remaining after a major earthquake, and could cause another at any time. .
It had previously been thought that large fault quakes are regular and that the next quake will occur after about the same amount of time as the previous two, but in reality this would not be the case.
“Taking into account the full history of earthquakes, rather than just the average over time and the time since the last one, will go a long way in forecasting when future earthquakes will occur.“, says Seth SteinProfessor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.
“When you’re trying to calculate a team’s chances of winning a ballgame, you don’t want to just look at the last game and the long-term average. It may also be helpful to look back at additional recent games. Now we can do something similar for earthquakes“, Add.
This new research has focused on accounting for plate boundary processes and deformation within the lithosphere using a variety of techniques including seismology, space-based geodesy, and marine geophysics.
“Big earthquakes don’t happen like clockwork. Sometimes we see several large earthquakes occur in relatively short periods of time, and then long periods where nothing happens. Traditional models cannot handle this behavior”, says the co-author of the study, James S. Neely.
They want to predict the next big earthquakes to save thousands of lives
It should be noted that earthquakes occur when tectonic plates move suddenly. Turkey sits on major fault lines, making it one of the hotspots for earthquakes.
And these catastrophic earthquakes occur when two tectonic plates suddenly slide in opposite directions.
So with this new model they hope that the tool will be useful for seismologists, so that they can improve earthquake forecasting and better prepare us for these types of future seismic events.
However, the United States Geological Survey notes that “A major earthquake has never been predicted nor can it be predicted.” in the short term future.
He comments that scientists could only calculate the probability of an earthquake occurring within a certain number of years.
